On Mother Brown's Doorstep

by Mary Jane Staples

  ‘Will never mentioned the traffic,’ said Susie, trying to keep her face straight.

  ‘No, but you know what I mean,’ said Annie. ‘Oh, wait till I see your brother. It’s not that he doesn’t ’ave some nice ways – well, I’ve come to thank him for the flowers he brought me, and it’s upset me dignity again to find he told everyone about me in a pushcart.’

  ‘Flowers?’ said Mr Brown.

  ‘Daffodils?’ said Susie.

  ‘Yes, they were lovely, a whole bunch,’ said Annie, ‘only I didn’t thank ’im properly. I was a bit overcome.’

  ‘I like bein’ overcome by flowers myself,’ said Susie.

  ‘I’ll overcome yer mum tomorrow, Susie,’ said Mr Brown, ‘I’ll buy ’er some daffs on me way ’ome from work, seein’ it’ll be me first day in charge at the new yard. Now don’t fret about that pushcart incident, Annie, I can tell yer Susie ’ad many a ride in one when she was young.’

  ‘Excuse me, Mr Brown,’ said Annie, ‘it wasn’t when she was seventeen, was it, and with ’er legs showin’?’

  Mr Brown, who could put a cheerful face on most things bar an earthquake, said, ‘Well, it’s not all bad news, Annie. I mean, there ain’t too many girls that could stop the traffic in a pushcart.’

  ‘Yes, cheer up,’ said Susie, ‘Will was only tryin’ to get you home the best way he could.’

  ‘Yes, but tellin’ everybody,’ said Annie. She glanced at Mr Brown. Mr Brown tried to look as if he thought a ride in a pushcart for a seventeen-year-old girl happened ten times a day in Walworth. Annie glanced at Susie. Susie looked reassuring. ‘Oh, well,’ said Annie, ‘I’ll just have to do my best to live it down. I don’t suppose it’ll take more than fifty years. I’d better go now or I’ll be late for church. Will you tell your brother I called to thank him properly for the flowers?’

  ‘We’ll tell him,’ said Susie.

  ‘Mind you,’ said Annie, ‘it’s only fair to say that if I do meet ’im again, I’ll have to give him a talkin’-to for tellin’ everyone about my indignity.’

  ‘Oh, yes, do give him that kind of talkin’-to,’ said Susie. ‘We girls shouldn’t suffer indignities in silence, or we’ll never get the better of men, will we?’

  Annie looked at her. Susie smiled. Annie saw a kindred spirit.

  ‘Is he goin’ back to the Army soon?’

  ‘No, he’s got a long leave, three months,’ said Susie.

  ‘Then I might ’ave a chance of givin’ him a talkin’-to,’ said Annie, and laughed. ‘Well, it’s been nice meetin’ you both,’ she said, and Susie saw her out. The church bell was ringing.

  Mrs Brown appeared in the passage.

  ‘Who was that, Susie?’

  ‘Annie Ford.’

  ‘What, the girl Will met? What did she want?’

  ‘To thank Will for a bunch of daffs he bought her,’ said Susie.

  ‘Well, bless me,’ said Mrs Brown, ‘he did take her some, then. Wasn’t that nice of him?’

  ‘I think he bowled her over.’

  ‘What was she like?’ asked Mrs Brown.

  ‘Just right for Will,’ said Susie.

  ‘Well, dearie me,’ said Mrs Brown, ‘d’you think Will might start askin’ her out?’

  ‘Well, Mum, while we don’t want to keep on about the pushcart, the fact is Will owes her something for puttin’ her in it,’ said Susie, ‘and he knows it. The daffs were only part-payment.’

  Monday morning saw Mr Brown at the Bermondsey scrap metal yard. The double wooden gates were in good order, and so was the brick wall surrounding the yard. The rest was a mess. That included the large lock-up wooden shed. Sammy had said it’ll be a tidying-up job for the first week, Jim. The shed’s close to falling down, so there’ll be a couple of men to help it on its way. They’ll knock it down and prepare the site for a new shed that’ll arrive in sections on Tuesday. You’ll have a mountain of timber from the old shed to get rid of.

  Granted, Sammy, Mr Brown had said. It could be burned in the yard, but that would be wasteful. Sammy said the natives of Bermondsey didn’t like wastefulness, it would upset them. Right, said Mr Brown, I’ll put a notice up on the gates, inviting them to come and help themselves to firewood. That’ll get rid of it unwastefully. Sammy, who liked a bit of imaginative wordage, said you sound like one of my family already, Jim. Sort out what stock there is with Eddie Mason, your assistant, and let me have written details when they’re ready. If any prospective customers look in, let them have a ten per cent discount on all standing stock to encourage them to clear us out. At present, the standing stock makes the place look like a junk yard. I’ll pop in and see how you’re doing from time to time.

  Mr Brown knew Sammy was being typically himself. It didn’t matter how much he was involved with all the big happenings, he still kept himself interested in everything else.

  The large old shed was coming down. The men had the tarred roof off and had smashed it up. Now the boarded walls were being hammered, split and torn out. Huge heaps of timber were building up for the benefit of the poverty-stricken people of the immediate neighbourhood, who were always in need of fuel for their fires. Mr Brown had put the notice up on the outside of the gates, inviting people to come and collect free firewood at four in the afternoon. That would allow mums to send their kids as soon as they came home from school, and the kids would arrive with eager arms, large sacks, empty prams and home-made pushcarts. And it would keep everyone away until all the dismantling work had been done.

  It was towards midday when the two men began to attack the floorboards, using long crowbars to lever the planks free from joists, which were set in a thick layer of gravel. At noon, Mr Brown sent his assistant, Eddie Mason, off to the pub for a beer and a sandwich. At about fifteen minutes past twelve, there was a sudden halt on the part of the workmen. Mr Brown, busy sorting out what there was in the way of brass, copper, lead and iron among the heaps of scrap, turned at the sudden silence. One workman, looking as if his face was drained of blood, said in a hoarse voice, ‘Guv’nor, I think you’d better come an’ take a look, an’ then fetch the police.’

  Mr Brown crossed the yard and looked at what the men had uncovered. An old soldier of the trenches, he’d seen death and he’d seen bodies that had lain unburied for days, but he too suffered a draining of blood at what he saw now.

  Uniformed police and CID men had been and eventually gone, and the decomposing body of a girl had been taken away. Mr Brown felt sick. Some of the repercussions were going to land in Sammy’s lap. The police had said nothing was to be touched for the time being, everything was to be left just as it was. Meanwhile, they had the job of trying to identify the dead girl.

  Sammy being out for the day, Mr Brown went to the Camberwell offices to see Boots, the general manager. His wife Emily was with him. She was his shorthand-typist and worked from nine-thirty until three-thirty. She was just about to go. She was a lively and energetic woman of twenty-seven, but very thin. To Mr Brown she seemed a little thinner each time he saw her, as if her inner energy devoured all the goodness of her food before it had any chance to do something for her body. But she owned magnificent auburn hair and big green eyes, and it was in her eyes that all her energy seemed to show.

  ‘Hello, Jim,’ she said, ‘thought you were at your new job in Bermondsey.’

  ‘Well, I was,’ said Mr Brown, feeling he didn’t want to land Boots’s wife with unpleasant news just when she was about to go home to spend time with her little son. It was the kind of news a man didn’t like giving a woman. ‘But I ’it a snag, which I ought to talk to Sammy about, only I just remembered ’e’s up in London Town somewhere.’

  ‘Kensington, among other places,’ said Boots.

  ‘Well, you can talk to Boots about it,’ said Emily. ‘Sammy’s good at verbalism’, Boots is good at listening. I’m off to see young Tim.’ Tim, her son, was four and a half years old. ‘So long, lovey,’ she said to Boots, and gave him a warm kiss. ‘So long, Jim.’ Off she went,
her step quick, as it always was, much as if she was continually trying to beat the passage of time.

  ‘Now, what’s the trouble, Jim?’ asked Boots.

  ‘Nasty,’ said Mr Brown.

  ‘How nasty?’ asked Boots.

  Susie’s dad recounted how the body of a girl had come to light. He had gone for the police, and they’d summoned a police doctor, who was of the opinion that the body had lain in the gravel under the shed floorboards for over a year. The doctor also said it would have been more decomposed than it was if it had been lying in earth.

  ‘Hell,’ said Boots, ‘that’s not a very good start, Jim.’

  ‘Told yer it was nasty, Boots,’ said Mr Brown. He got on well with Boots, who rarely turned a hair at setbacks. Sammy could be dramatic.

  ‘Poor young girl,’ said Boots. He supposed it was murder, and he disliked murder even more than most people. He’d been close to a grisly one in his teens, close enough for it to have been only a few doors away. He had memories of that which he would never forget. ‘Think of her moments of terror, Jim.’

  ‘Murder, that’s what it was,’ said Mr Brown, ‘and ’anging’s too good for the bugger who did it. The police ’ave made me shut down the yard for the time bein’, and they’ve got the spare key for the gate padlock. The point is, what’s it goin’ to do to the business?’

  ‘It needn’t do anything,’ said Boots. ‘It’s bloody unpleasant, but it’s the previous owners who’ll have to cope with the real worries. We’ve only just taken it over. Let’s see, who were the previous owners?’

  ‘Collier and Son,’ said Mr Brown. ‘I told the police.’

  ‘D’you know when they stopped doing any real business, Jim? Sammy said the place was pretty run-down.’

  ‘I only know Sammy said on Friday that they hadn’t done any business for gawd knows how long,’ said Mr Brown. ‘It seemed they was just ’anging on to the site. I suppose what you’re on about, is that someone ’ad use of the place, and use of the shed, if you can call it use when you do a young girl in an’ bury ’er there. An’ he ’ad to ’ave that use without anyone gettin’ suspicious the day after.’

  ‘Such as noticing certain floorboards had been removed and replaced,’ said Boots. ‘Yes, you’d notice a thing like that, I’d say. Well, all right, Jim, it’s not your worry, nor mine, nor Sammy’s. The headache belongs to Collier and Son. We’ve just got a nasty taste in our mouths. Why don’t you push off home and get Mrs Brown to make you a large pot of tea? You look whacked.’

  ‘No, I’d rather do a bit,’ said Mr Brown, ‘I’ll clean the shop windows.’

  ‘I don’t think Sammy would recommend that,’ said Boots.

  ‘I’d like to do something,’ said Mr Brown. Boots’s phone rang, and Susie’s dad slipped out. He supposed Boots was right, that Sammy wouldn’t want him to clean windows, not now he was a yard manager and only a few weeks away from being Sammy’s dad-in-law. So he went to the firm’s scrap yard in Olney Road, which was always busy, and where he could do some useful work for an hour or so before going home. Doing something would take that body off his mind.

  Emily had decided to walk home, thinking it would be a lot more healthy for her than sitting in a bus when she’d been sitting at her typewriter most of the day. She walked briskly along Denmark Hill, liking the attractive look of its trees, houses and gardens. She’d never been able to do anything slowly, anyway. But she did get a bit tired more quickly these days. The doctor said she was anaemic, that she should eat more, especially lightly cooked liver. Actually, she didn’t seem to want a lot of food, and a large plateful put her off. She thought it might be a good idea to go and see her old general practitioner, Dr McManus of Walworth, and get a second opinion.

  She didn’t want to get ill, that was certain. If she became a sort of invalid and couldn’t be a proper wife to Boots, that woman Polly Simms, a teacher at Rosie’s school, would be all over him, showing him how healthy she was herself. Emily knew Polly had had her eye on Boots for ages, and of course being upper class, she wouldn’t think anything of trying to pinch someone else’s husband. She wanted to pinch Boots all right, Emily was sure of that.

  I’ll fight that to me last drop of breath, she thought, I’ll fight it even if I have to eat pounds of nearly raw liver every day. I’m not going to let any woman get her hands on Boots. I know we’ve got a good marriage, even if we have had one or two ups and downs. I just wish I’d given him more children, I know he’d have liked four, like Lizzy and Ned have. Oh, lor’, could it have been me hidden anaemia that worked against me? It’s only come out these last few months. I’ll get to be a bag of bones soon instead of a wife.

  Boots and Sammy had been so good, giving Susie’s dad a job as a scrap yard manager. Sammy had mentioned the idea to Boots, and Boots of course had said well, as he’s Susie’s dad, yes, you could treat him as one of the family instead of a window cleaner. That was it really with Sammy and Boots and all the Adams. They made you one of the family if your connections were close enough. The family was what they lived for. It all came from their mum, Chinese Lady. The family was everything to her. Strangely, she could be much more critical of her sons than her daughters-in-law. But she was a cockney mum, and most cockney mums knew boys needed their ears boxing far more than girls did. Telling them off now that they were all grown up was a sort of substitute for boxing their ears.

  Emily smiled as she let herself into the house. Tim, her lively four-year-old son, came running into the hall. Not feeling too tired after her walk, she hugged him, lifted him and kissed him smackingly.

  ‘Is that you, Em’ly?’ called Chinese Lady from somewhere.

  ‘Yes, it’s me, I’m home, Mum,’ called Emily.

  Home. That was the best word ever.

  Annie had gone to her work in a thinking frame of mind. She kept asking herself if the present of that bunch of daffs had meant more than a nice gesture, if it meant Will Brown would come round and see her again. She’d had boys give her the eye when she was younger. Lately her dad had said it was time she had a young man. She wouldn’t object if Will Brown asked to take her out, except she’d let him know she didn’t want him laughing at her and treating her as if she was more of a joke than a young lady.

  Her place of work, the grocer’s shop in the New Kent Road, was large and always had a lovely grocery smell. The open sacks that lined the floor against the front of the counter gave off the aroma of currants, sultanas, raisins, rice, sugar, prunes and other items. Mr Urcott, in his spotless white apron, presided at the dairy counter, and had a miraculous way of shaping chunks of butter or margarine into neat oblongs and expertly wrapping them in grease-proof paper. He was a funny old bloke. Well, he was over fifty, had thinning hair and spectacles that always perched halfway down his nose. But he was really kind, he had a smile for all his customers and even for ragged kids who came to ask did he have a pound of broken biscuits for tuppence? If he said no, one of them was sure to say he’d break up a pound of whole ones, if Mr Urcott would like.

  He kept his shop clean, and he kept two large cats, which padded around silently at night in search of any mice foolish enough to be drawn out by the smell of cheese.

  The shop had been open for an hour when Annie arrived at her prescribed time of ten o’clock. Mr Urcott greeted her with a smile and a comment over the head of a little old lady customer.

  ‘Well, here you are, Annie. Did you hop all the way?’

  ‘No, I treated meself to a tram ride this mornin’, Mr Urcott.’

  ‘Best way too,’ said the little old lady, who was wearing a granny bonnet. ‘I ’opped all the way up our street once when I was a girl, and me drawers fell down. You don’t want that to ’appen at your age, Annie, it’ll upset yer dignity. So don’t do no ’opping.’

  ‘You can be sure I won’t, Mrs Gurney,’ said Annie.

  ‘It’s what comes of tapes wearin’ out,’ said the little old lady, not a bit concerned that Mr Urcott was listening. ‘My granddaughter sa
ys elastic’s best, but I don’t trust elastic meself. Yes, now I’ll ’ave two ounces of yer New Zealand butter, Mr Urcott, I can afford that this week. I don’t know I can afford elastic, even if I trusted it.’ She prattled away.

  ‘Hello, Annie.’ That greeting came from Mr Urcott’s other assistant, Miss Banks, a single lady in her thirties and a niece of the grocer. She was kind too, but more brisk than Mr Urcott. She looked after the opposite counter, and Annie helped her there. Annie also kept the shop looking tidy, and attended to all orders that required anything from the open sacks to be packeted up in twists of brown paper after being weighed. The shop was busy most days, its prices being competitive, its atmosphere laden with the appeal of a good grocery establishment that had well-stocked shelves, shining marble counters and cheerful staff. Striving, hard-up housewives knew they could get good value and a little gossip as well, if they wanted it.

  Mr Urcott had three customers at his counter, and Miss Banks had four. Annie, donning her white apron, began to help. There was a lull after all the customers had been served, and Mr Urcott took the opportunity to ask Annie if her knee was quite better.

  ‘Yes, thanks, Mr Urcott, it’s only a bit twingey now,’ she said.

  ‘Twingey? Well,’ said Mr Urcott, smiling benevolently at her over the top of his spectacles, ‘if it gets hurtful twingey, Annie, you can sit down on one of the customers’ chairs.’ There were two chairs, one at each counter, mainly for the benefit of old ladies.

  ‘Oh, I won’t ’ave to do that,’ said Annie.

  The day passed pleasantly for her, she liked the work and her wages of ten bob a week were quite generous. Lots of factory girls only earned seven and six for doing a fifty-hour week. At a quarter to four, close to her finishing time, Annie was rearranging a shelf. Mr Urcott and Miss Banks each had a customer. Annie jumped as someone addressed her back.

  ‘Afternoon, miss, and a pound of turnips, if yer please.’