One of the Family

by Monica Dickens

  Madge’s friend Will Morrison was a law student who had taken time off from his studies and did not see how he could ever go back to them, since there was so much to do here. He was an intense young idealist with fiery eyes and a red beard. Madge’s mother, Gwen, said he looked like an uncarnivorous fox. Madge had learned something from him of how to keep the dream in spite of the hopeless mass of need. Will had learned something from her about realistic commonsense.

  She pulled on the unbleached smock which all the women volunteers wore to disguise too decorative clothes and joined Will in the adult reading class, where he was the professor and she moved about among the battered benches giving individual help to students like laundrywoman Bridget, who was infatuated with words but could not turn them into sense, and frowning young Ted Barrett, who might go on to industrial school when he could read and write.

  Madge knew Will so thoroughly that she could see through the tricks and dramatics that he used to inspire the shabby group, walking up and down, waving his arms about and exploding into poetry to drive the beauty of the English language into inarticulate men and women who were labouring over a single sentence. Three of the men who were on night shift at the dockyard were asleep. Sometimes Madge felt that perhaps she might love Will after all. She admired him, and they were very close; but there was no time for sentiment, and their equality was not a basis for love between a man and a woman, as Madge understood it.

  At a trestle table together in the hall, they had soup and bread made by the domestic class. The grubby little girl Angel sat on Madge’s knee to have soup fed into her. When her threshing limbs tipped over the bowl and knocked away the spoon, she turned her smashed-looking face up to Madge with a crow of laughter.

  The invalid children, ‘the cripples’ as they were called, in their special chairs and little carts, made as much noise as anyone. Mr Firbright, the Settlement Director, banged out tunes on the propped-up piano, with a chorus around him eating hunks of bread and singing.

  Madge wanted to stay with the children, but Will told her, in his quick, breathless way, in a scurry of words, ‘Go and help Jack Haynes, Maddy. He’s upset about something. I tried to talk to him last night, but he wouldn’t.’

  Jack was on his way out to the yard to take a boys’ group in physical drill. He was a broad, strong fellow with bristly black hair, who had drifted here one night when he could no longer try to sleep in the Salvation Army penny sit-up, or on his feet, leaning on a rope in the doss-house. He had been wary, sullen, afraid that his cot in the dormitory was a trap. In his twenties, he was cut off from his fellow men. He had been almost completely deaf since a childhood illness. The Settlement was now his home. He was learning carpentry, and the Director gave him a little money for helping with the boys.

  Madge found him ambling down an airless underground passage that led to the hot square of the courtyard. She touched his arm and he turned and gave her his bulldog smile.

  ‘Can I come and help?’ She made signs that they had invented between them.

  Jack had heard and spoken and begun to read and write as a child, before he lost the sounds of the world. His speech was rough and flat and often too loud, but fairly understandable when you knew him well.

  In her loose smock, Madge stood with him at the front of the disorderly group in the yard, and kicked off her hard-heeled shoes to show the exercises. The group soon broke up, hooting, into a scuffle with a ball. Jack shrugged his shoulders and started to go off, but Madge stood in front of him, the cinders of the yard prickling through her stockings.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ If she faced him and spoke loud and slow with an expressive face, he could partly hear and partly guess at what her mouth was saying.

  Jack looked away from her. ‘Ou’side.’ He jerked his head beyond the high wall at the end of the yard. He clasped his hands together in the sign for ‘friends’ they had invented.

  ‘What friends, Jack?’

  He shook his head and looked sly. He tried to leave her, but she grabbed the sleeve of his patched shirt and made him stay with her in a corner of the yard. Using a mixture of miming and Jack’s distorted speech, Madge understood that cronies from his old lawless days were after him.

  After he had lost his hearing, his mother had put him into the overcrowded Old Kent Road asylum where he had learned a few hand signs; but they had pushed him out at thirteen to be abused as a sweatshop apprentice, until he had disappeared into the streets. Madge knew that a gang of robbers had found him useful as a lookout, because the police thought he was only a mental defective.

  ‘Friends.’ Jack made the hand sign again and grinned unhappily.

  ‘No, Jack, you’ve got too much to lose.’

  He looked blank. You were never sure whether he did not understand, or was pretending. Profound deafness was Jack’s handicap. He also used it as an escape.

  ‘Money.’ He made the sign with his forefinger in his palm.

  ‘Keep working here, and soon you’ll have a job. You’ll be paid money.’

  His eyes wandered off to some dream of his old street life where there was nothing as stable as work or wages.

  ‘Don’t be a fool,’ Madge said clearly.

  ‘Me a few?’ Jack repeated. He put his hand in his pocket and gave her two coppers before he ran off among the shrieking boys, kicking the ball away from them. ‘Oi! Oi, Jack!’

  ‘Oi!’ he shouted, and was gone through the iron gate out on to the streets.

  ‘How was Jack?’ Will asked later before Madge went home.

  ‘Wavering. Sometimes I feel he’s like a wild animal that’s been tamed but could break out at any time. In the end, we may lose him.’

  ‘No,’ Will said. ‘He’s come so far. Hold on, Maddy. We never give up.’

  ‘But if it’s hopeless ...’

  ‘Nothing’s hopeless.’ His eyes blazed into hers. He kissed her with warm red lips within his rough beard and held her very tightly.

  ‘Come back with me to 72. My parents are asking for you.’

  ‘I can’t.’ He loosened his grip. ‘I’ve too much to do.’ He pulled away, looking fiercely preoccupied.

  Madge let him go, and went to Chelsea on the way home to enjoy inconsequential conversation and jokes with her youngest aunt, Vera, who was never serious about anything.

  In the comfortably furnished upstairs consulting room, the woman’s face was prettily flushed, her large eyes bright and anxious.

  ‘The palpitations ...’ She put up a hand to her neck, where the pulse beat rapidly. ‘I’m so afraid they’re starting again. I’m losing my breath, I –’

  ‘Calm down, my dear.’ The man moved across quickly to sit beside her. ‘It’s all right. Just let me loosen your collar, so that you can breathe more easily.’ He opened the fastenings at the top of her dress, and kept his hand on the white fluttering skin. ‘There, it’s all right, try to breathe slowly.’

  With his hand on the naked swell of her breast, stroking, soothing, his voice murmuring close to the soft perfume of her cheek, he held her against him, and gradually her breathing turned to sighs of pleasure.

  He congratulated himself. This was how to deal with hysterical women. Especially the pretty ones.

  After lunch on that Saturday, with Leonard not yet home from Whiteley’s, although the store was closed at one, Gwen Morley was sitting with her feet up by her open drawing room window, listening to her cousin’s son, who had a broken heart.

  A lot of people brought their troubles to Gwen. As a rather dreamy and inactive woman, she was often to be found at home, doing nothing more preoccupying than reading a novel or sighing over the household accounts. She was kind-hearted, too kind ever to be ‘out’ to anybody, and too curious. Her gently smiling face invited confidences, and she did not fortify her peaceful sympathy by doing something positive, like writing a letter of reference, which might force a vacillating soul to action.

  The sad young man was interrupted by Dicky, bounding down the length of the room
to tell his mother that he was off down the Lane with Flora, who was going to buy greens at the market.

  ‘All right, darling.’ His mother kissed his firm shining cheek. ‘Be back in time for your supper and bath before the family comes for the birthday dinner.’

  ‘Whose birthday?’

  ‘Aunt Teddie’s.’

  The boy made a vomiting sound and dashed out. Gwen stood on the small balcony to watch him run ahead of Flora Bolt in her plain market hat.

  ‘What’s “down the Lane”?’ the young man asked morosely behind her.

  ‘The Portobello Road.’ She pointed towards the narrow street that ran along the side of the house. ‘That’s what they call it, the friends Dicky plays with down there.’

  ‘Don’t you worry about him running free in the street like that, Mrs Morley?’

  ‘No, why should I? The Portobello Road is his village.’ She sat gracefully down again with her small slender feet on a tapestry stool. ‘Now Eric, my dear, go on telling me what Penelope said in her last letter.’

  The young man was very pale and anguished. Gwen thought she might suggest a strychnine tonic.

  The Lane was once a country road that led to a farm called Portobello, after an eighteenth-century naval victory in the Caribbean. It eventually grew into a busy winding street of houses and small shops that did a useful trade in every kind of food and household goods the neighbourhood demanded. People who thought in pennies shopped here, but so did many of those who thought in guineas and came from the middle-class colonies of crescents and villas at the respectable end of the Lane.

  Every week costermongers and street traders set up their stalls in the Portobello Road, selling cut-price food and old iron and cheap clothes and bags of cloth remnants and china and knick-knacks and medals and jewellery whose origins nobody except the police worried much about. On Saturday, market day, with the fruit and vegetable barrows, and the shop goods spilling out on the pavement, and the jugglers and barrel organs among the noisy crowds, the narrow Lane was impassable to anything on wheels wider than a bicycle.

  Dicky’s friends Tiger and Noah were waiting for him at the first corner by the Lord Nelson. They could have come up to his house, but they preferred to keep clear of Chepstow Villas.

  Noah had a thatch of dusty hair and Tiger had a shaved head this summer, with the white marks of ringworm. They were both like monkeys, quick and daring, and a great joy to Dicky as a free-spirited change from the friends with whom he went to school.

  Flora kept them close to her as long as possible by promising them pennies for liquorice strips. Further down towards the raffish end of the market, they found Flora’s stepbrother Ben with one of his pals at an intriguing stall of jumbled treasures. He smoked a black cigar and wore a white scarf in the neck of his flash jacket and sharp side-whiskers under a yellow boater. He was a thrilling and powerful personage, for whom Noah and Tiger, and even occasionally Dicky, had worked as runners between the various curio stalls, checking prices and watching for known crafty characters, or the plain-clothes police who might be watching those.

  After Flora had handed out the pennies to stop their clamour, the three boys left her gossiping with Ben and ran on, dodging among the crowds, beyond the market to where the Portobello Road meandered into the miasmal slums of Notting Dale.

  Noah and Tiger were barefoot, in skimpy breeches. Dicky, in square flannel shorts to the knee, had taken off his stockings and boots and stuffed them under a crate at the back of Ben’s stall. They ducked down an alley to peer through the gate of the little graveyard where slanted and toppling tombstones jostled each other like pebbles on a beach. Sucking the liquorice, with noses through the wrought iron, they imagined the rotting stench of local legend.

  ‘Cor, smell them stiffs!’

  Their eyes bulged to spot a spectre.

  ‘I’d go in there,’ Dicky boasted, because the high gate was padlocked.

  Arm in arm, they swaggered through backstreets like a gang, playing games of chasing and hiding, and seeing how far they could get over backyard walls and outhouse roofs without being spotted and yelled at. Outside a public house, they watched two policemen lift an intoxicated man off the cobbles and take him away strapped on a cart. Noah and Tiger ran behind, jeering. Dicky did not. They were getting dangerously near the outskirts of the Potteries, the foul old brickfields where pigs were still penned in bogs outside some of the hovels, and blood and offal, Flora said, were boiled up in coppers to make rancid fat. Whose blood? A child might disappear in Pottery Lane.

  ‘Bit early for drunks,’ Dicky said knowledgeably when his friends came back looking for him. Later, after he was in bed, he might wake to hear from his front window the Saturday carousers come caterwauling down the Lane from the Sun in Splendour with howls of song and hawking coughs.

  Thinking of his safe bedroom reminded him: ‘I’ve got to go home.’

  The boys punched each other and parted. When Dicky reached for his boots under the canvas back of the curio stall, Ben’s pal was arguing over a vase with an angry buyer, and Ben and Flora were gone.

  Chapter Four

  Being a confident and adventurous character herself, Flora did not worry about Dicky. The nipper would turn up at home all right, with new tears in his clothes and new scrapes on his knees. When her stepbrother Ben vanished into the market crowds, she took a quick side-trip down Talbot Road to see her mother, stopping at the draper’s to buy a length of tartan ribbon for her sister’s hair, and getting the farthing change in a paper of pins.

  This younger sister Violet was the shining light of No. 7 Talbot Close. She wore a self-conscious waterfall of long thick wavy hair down her back, and attended the church school and the Girls’ Friendly Society. She was her mother’s last focus of hope. The first son had disappeared to sea. The second son, a wall-eyed night watchman, came home to eat and sleep at the wrong times and kick the cats. Flora was in service, but she had married a drunken bigamist when all was said and done.

  After Flora’s father had died while serving a sentence for robbery with violence, her mother had married a sullen man who had returned from the Boer war with nerves, and never lost them for fear of being reclaimed by the Army. Daddy Watts, as he was known, spent a lot of time in the bed in the corner of the kitchen, where he could monitor everyone in the house.

  ‘Get up and get a job,’ his wife said automatically every day, like, ‘Good morning.’

  ‘A man in my condition?’

  Daddy Watts was a fence, working with his son Ben and selling to market traders all over London. The room that had been Flora’s narrow bedroom was always crammed with ‘supplies’, which came in after dark from the alley behind. Flora now lived in the narrow back-basement room off the scullery at No. 72 Chepstow Villas. Before that, she had lodged with her husband Bill, known as ‘Bull’ Bolt, until he kicked her out in a drunken rage. Sometimes he came here looking for her. If he ever came bothering her at Chepstow Villas, she would kill him.

  ‘Seen Bolt about?’ Flora asked her mother.

  ‘Bolt, she says.’ Her stepfather took out his short crusted pipe to spit over the side of the bed in the rough direction of a cracked chamber-pot on the floor.

  ‘Only once, on the bus,’ her mother said. ‘He was in a fight with a man who wanted to go the other way.’

  Bull was a ‘cad’, a conductor on the horse-buses who padded out his lean wages by cramming too many passengers on board and pocketing some of the fares.

  ‘That’s my man.’ Flora had a permanent scar under her frizzy fringe from Bull Bolt, but there was still a tug of fascination.

  ‘Sit down, girl, and tell me about the family.’ Her mother tipped a battered tabby cat off a chair. She craved news from the higher levels, as long as it wasn’t all good. ‘Poor things,’ she added hopefully.

  ‘Poor things, Ma?’

  ‘With all the responsibility of property and wealth.’

  ‘Wealth? She’d like to hear that, Madam would, when she’s
paying the tradesmen’s bills.’

  ‘Ruined?’

  ‘Rubbish.’ Flora gave her great ho-ho laugh and went to the door. ‘I’ve got to get back to lay the dinner table. I only popped in to give Vi the bit of ribbon.’

  ‘Which is too short,’ Violet said smugly.

  ‘I’ll make you too short.’ Flora showed a fist.

  ‘Bows are bigger now,’ Violet said in her Girls’ Friendly, vicar’s pet voice.

  ‘Well, yours won’t be. I’m off.’

  ‘You’d think she’d stay to help us here,’ Daddy Watts crabbed from the bed.

  ‘She came, didn’t she?’ Flora’s mother rounded on him with a twist to her bluish mouth.

  ‘Might as well not have.’ Daddy Watts wore a kerchief round his head, slantwise, so that he could leer at you with one eye open and one half closed.

  Why do I bother? Poor batty Ma. We were better off after my dad was put away. Why do women go on hitching theirselves up? Flora raged up the slope of Kensington Park Road to get back to No. 72 before Winnie Stokes, the outside parlourmaid, arrived to help with the dinner.

  Dicky, who was not staying up for late dinner, wanted to have his supper in the kitchen, where there was a lot going on, which was why the cook, Mrs Roach, said No. She and her niece Tat, who worked here as housemaid and kitchen-maid, were getting together a five-course meal for fifteen. Cream soup, scalloped brill, roast turkey, Queen’s pudding (for Aunt Teddie’s birthday), mushrooms au gratin. Flora and Winnie Stokes were in and out with huge trays. Mrs Salter the charlady, who had come in to help with the washing-up, was in the basket chair by the window with a cup of hot lemonade to flush her kidneys. Dicky, grubby from the Lane, sat down at a corner of the big cluttered table and wanted bacon and fried bread. ‘And mushrooms,’ when he saw them in a bowl.