by Dave Wallis
“We’ll get some food first,” said Ernie, “and then see about trading some of the rest of the stuff. Take some of our petrol, girls, and see what you can get.” He handed out medicine bottles full of petrol which were nowadays worth about four tins of beans. “We’ll get some paraffin and get the stoves going.”
The girls set off, picking their way among the mud and puddles of the trodden paths between the stalls. Shortages and the breaking up of the bigger mobs ended any overall fashion styles but the need nowadays was for tough, competent girls good for more than love and frying eggs. So female dress came to hint subtly at new qualities, with either the top of the body in frilly feminine blouses and the legs in boots and jeans or else the other way round so that wide-belted bell skirts went with casually worn military-like tunics. As often in times of stress many bosoms retreated once more behind masculine-looking shirts. Bright colours flew like flags against the plague and the encroaching bleakness. For the rest, each small community of girls developed their own local costumes.
In a truce brought on by the pressure of the hunt Kathy and Julia strolled towards some distant material stalls with Estelle and another girl of the gang following a few paces behind.
They paused to watch a pair of lithe boys who were mounting and dismounting two docile ponies trotting round in a circle tossing their small heads and unkempt burr-tangled manes. A rough poster said, “End petrol worrys, buy a pony, prices by arrangement.” Seeing the girls watching them the equestrian boys started leaping higher and more dangerously and giving imitation cowboy yells in a Dorset accent. One of the ponies stumbled and snorted and the boy lashed at its neck with a rope thong.
“Let’s go,” said Kathy. They strolled on through the squelching maze. Young girls with black finger-nails and brown-scorched faces counted out untrimmed unwashed carrots and potatoes. Live chickens fussed and clucked in crates and broad-hipped country girls haggled over the number of eggs to be bartered for bottles of Woolworth’s perfume. Everywhere sheep scampered in terror and stupidity in front of buyers’ feet and under booths, then stopped still in any odd open space and nibbled calmly at the muddy, trodden grass, turning quick glances here and there with the empty brightness of a defective. Their owners, cursing and slipping, advanced on them with ropes. The gold of this, as of all markets, had become tobacco. A real packet of cigarettes, still sealed in cellophane, could buy a whole sheep, a night with a girl or even a motor-bike in running order and ready-filled with petrol. One day soon the last ounce of tobacco would be rolled in tissue and the last cigarette would be smoked. The thought was shuffled away, as so many others, but the price kept rising.
Kathy and Julia had led the way towards that part of the fair where there had been a stall of frocks and blouses on display a month before. A crowd, moving, craning and pushing, barred their path. The air was suddenly full of a drugging, mouth-watering smell of roast mutton and baking flour. Suffering some pinches and strokings on the way, they pushed to the front. A couple, both with sacking aprons round their waists, were selling slices of roast meat wrapped in a flabby curl of stuff, half-pancake, half-pastry and it was this unleavened Arab bread which was the main attraction. The girl with her sleeves rolled up and her red arms whitened by flour, mixed some grey looking powder and milk and water in a bowl and poured the mixture over a flattened dust-bin lid which lay across the embers. The toasted dough was turned and cut and wrapped around a lumpy slice of hot meat and sold for half a cigarette, a tin of soup or a quarter pint of petrol.
The girls bought one each of these and stood in the mud eating them with the crowd pressing around. All about them young white teeth closed on the food, and grease and meat juices ran down the unshaven jaws and the girls’ faces became shiny with fat.
They finished and Kathy said, “I wish I knew how to make that stuff, or Ernie or one of our boys knew how to kill and skin a sheep.” Julia nodded and the sacking-aproned girl paused in her carving and mixing and said, “You cockneys don’t know how to do anything. Still I’m glad you enjoyed it. Just keep bringing us up all the petrol and stuff you can comb and we’ll always sell you a roast.” She was torn between the need to show her contempt and a certain respect for the customer which hung on from the days of the oldies.
Wiping their fingers on crumbling tissues they had bought from a stall, they walked on. “Hello,” said a girl. “Remember me? I’m Joan.” It was a blonde with a habit of putting her head on one side and pouting, who had been with the gang for a short time before the Windsor victory. “What are you doing here?”
“Just looking for some decent clothes and food the same as everyone else,” said Kathy.
“Isn’t it awful,” said Joan. “There’s really nothing left, if you’re civilised, I mean. These peasants don’t care what they wear. How come you’re all here? I heard you’d taken Windsor and got all the stuff you needed.”
“It went,” said Kathy. “And a lot of it was pinched by slaves we set free at Windsor.”
“So now you’re looking for stuff, eh? Well, you won’t get much here, it’s getting dreadful, it is, really, I don’t know what’s going to happen.”
“We’ve managed up to now,” said Kathy.
“That’s because we never used up the stuff before. Now it’s all really getting low. There’s a few things left, but you have to search around and pay such a lot. And some of the boys, well! I’ve never believed in selling it, have you?” she asked Julia, wishing to thaw out a new acquaintance. She was a friendly girl.
“No,” said Kathy, “I’m sure we don’t.” Julia ignored her and turned to the new girl. “You seem to know your way around here. Where can we get some stockings and some decent coloured blouses?”
“We have to get some food for the boys, first,” said Kathy, taking charge.
“Oh, let them go to that kind of hot-dog stall like we did,” said Julia.
“That’s a good idea.” They asked Joan to come with them.
“O.K.,” she said, “I’d like to see Ernie again, and your other boys,” she added quickly, with a glance at Kathy.
They strolled back to the vans, having to stop every now and then as bullocks and sheep and small pony-carts heaped with vegetables crossed their path. The crowd pressed and jostled around them. You could tell the city villains by their air of half-defiant unease, and by their feet as they picked a way in pointed shoes among the mud and cow-cakes, dodging the boots and the hoofs.
They reached the vans. Ernie was complaining angrily about the price of paraffin for the primus. “These hayseeds, these swede-bashers. I wish we had ’em up the smoke and it was the old days. I’d give ’em six spark plugs a pint! . . .”
“This is Joan, Ernie, remember?” said Kathy nodding at the girl.
“Hullo,” said Ernie, and to Kathy added, “Where’s the grub?”
“We found a kind of stall where you can get roast meat in a kind of roll. It’s not worth the bother of cooking anything. Look, it’s over there . . .” she pointed across the crowd.
“What do you think we paid out all that for for the oil? Just so we’ve got to go and stand around eating in the open on our feet like some of these peasants! Get some grub and get cooking it!”
The other girls were silent but Kathy flared, “Who do you think you’re talking to? We’re not your slaves. Go and get some of that ready-cooked stuff if you want to eat. If not, go without.”
Ernie stood for a moment, a discomforted cock among hens, the other boys were getting the stoves going in the second truck, and then turned with a forced grunt of contempt and slouched off through the crowd shouting to Charlie and Robert to follow him.
“That’s got rid of them, then,” said Julia rather awkwardly. They made tea for themselves on the primus. Kathy suddenly thought of Ernie crouched down getting it going to be ready for her return, while they had been watching pony-riders, looking for stockings and eating meat. It was too late to call after him and Joan was speaking, “You ought to put out the pri
muses. Oil is getting impossible. We’ll all be cooking over bonfires soon, like they do in the jungle or something.” Kathy put out the stoves.
“Don’t you ever get fed up with it?” Joan said. “I mean stuff getting shorter and shorter. The boys fighting all the time and getting worse to handle.”
Julia said, “We don’t look at it like that. And I’ve never found the boys difficult to handle.”
“Handle is right,” said Kathy.
“You shut up,” hissed Julia.
“There doesn’t seem to be the kick in things like there used to be,” Joan went on. “And no joy in anything. Working here running the stalls or shifting stuff from the lorries and carts your hands get all rough and horrible and your wrists red and it’s such a business even to wash your hair. . . .”
“It’s healthy here, though, isn’t it,” said Estelle. “No plague or anything, Charlie was saying we might all get the plague and go the same way as the oldies.”
“Go, but not the same way,” said Kathy.
“Then there’s this boy,” said Joan. They all drew a bit closer and watched her and listened. “Well, it’s easy to explain. Corniest story in the world. I can’t get him out of my mind.”
No girl would confess to failure with a boy unless she was in a really bad way. They felt the warm smugness of superiority merge into a desire to help a member of the sisterhood.
“Go on,” said Kathy. “We’ve all been through it.”
“Speak for yourself,” said Julia.
“Don’t pay any attention to them,” said Estelle, “just tell us about it, even if we can’t help it sort of does you good, I mean.”
“He was one of these Northern boys that came down here with a drove of sheep. I just thought he was another hayseed but he had a load of spares with him as well and he knew all about motor-bikes and so on; but that wasn’t it. There’s lots like that.” She paused and put her narrow head on one side and stroked her cheek with a thin hand whose wrist was reddened and roughened by work above the glove line.
She shook her blonde curls and fixed her gaze down at the tips of her pointed boots. Speaking to the floor she went on, “It wasn’t that, nor even how he looked, though he was very good-looking in a country sort of way, it was when, well, when he came to the stall run by Bill, the boy I was going with then, and he bargained a couple of sheepskins for some stuff and a lot of tinned milk and three aspirins, then he went shooting off. You know what? You know what the idiot was doing?” She gave a short laugh. “I strolled over after him, telling myself I was just curious, you know? And there he was talking to an old ewe that was in the family way and lying down bleating. He was trying to get her to take the aspirins in some tinned milk. I ask you! That was when it happened. It was such a strong feeling it frightened me. I didn’t know what was happening to me. I knew how to help the damn sheep. We’d had to learn that in the business, to keep the stock up. You’d think a country boy like that’d have had some clue but he didn’t. He was talking to her, this old ewe I mean, and saying ‘there, there’ like an idiot. I had to laugh but what had just happened made me see straight away it was a mistake and I knew enough to shut up and just help him. I could only think about being near him in any case, not about anything else at all. It stayed like that, it still is, really, but I never see him now.” She started to cry in a slow and undramatic fashion.
“We set up together. It was marvellous, it really was, and I was able to help him, about the market prices and things like that, and get some food ready when he got back with the silly sheep. He used to tease me about my being a city girl, well, Hemel Hempstead New Town, I ask you! But it was all the South and cities to him. That ought to have warned me but it didn’t. I only woke up too late. I suppose you always do.
“Like a fool I thought that I’d better make myself more like the girls he’d left. I didn’t want him thinking he was the farmer’s boy as far as I was concerned or anything like that. I did my hair different, flat and straight, and wore a skirt instead of jeans all the time.” Julia was leaning forward and seemed about to interrupt. She was shaking her head slowly and looking at Joan through narrowed eyes.
“Then there was this girl who came out with a gang who had a load of tinned soups and hair-clips. All dolled up to the nines and she set her cap at him one day when we were trading. I just joked about it. I never dreamed it would happen. Within a day I came across them together when they thought I was safely away out of it. I’d’ve forgiven him, see? She knew that, so she made sure he had to go right through with it and go away with her. It wasn’t his fault you see? It really wasn’t,” she repeated as Julia grinned grimly at her. “I followed them. I could see I had become just a nuisance to him but it didn’t stop me. You know how it is – or do you? I crawled. I begged and prayed to him, made little jokes about times we’d been together and it all only annoyed him more but I couldn’t stop. When you’re like that you’d rather you even annoyed the other person than not be noticed at all. Now they’ve gone off again and I don’t know where. I just hang around here hoping he’ll come back, even with her it’d be something. I’d be near him and I suppose he enjoys being with her. . . .” She paused and looked around at the girls.
They looked back at her. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I know this must be all boring for you. Thanks for the tea. I’ll go now.” They made some not very strong pretence of dissuading her.
The boys came back, cheerful and full of food. Only Charlie seemed a bit morose. “There’s something going to happen here,” was all he would say, and, when pressed, “These hayseeds have got something after all.”
They drank tea and then organised a washing session, ready for the evening. The boys of whom there were more, took over the large van and the girls the smaller. Buckets of water were fetched from the tanks of the row of decaying houses and were heated up on the primus stoves. The vans were soon full of steam and the sour smell of sweat and stale toilet soap. The boys were quick, business-like and untidy about it all and when finished, or waiting their turns, they joked, fooled around and flicked one another with towels. In the girls’ van there was more modesty and a mutual distaste. Each spent hours in front of the mirror and when their bare thighs or buttocks brushed they edged apart and murmured “Oh, sorry.”
The girls changed and piled dirty clothes in the corner and then sat chatting, knees casually apart, until the boys knocked on the door, and were told to come in.
“Smells like a brothel,” said Ernie cheerfully.
“Well, it’s not,” said Kathy.
“Kath,” Ernie went on, “there’s a lot of dirty clothes we just took off and I’m down to my last shirt.”
“It’s not a laundry here either,” said Kathy.
The other boys crowded in and sat on the floor of the van.
“We’ll just have to get some more clothes, pinch some from some of these hayseeds round here,” said Ernie.
“Don’t know that’ll do much good,” said Charlie, “even if we got away with it we’d never be able to come back to this market again and there’s nowhere else to go, not for hundreds of miles now.”
Estelle said, “Couldn’t you boys get some sheep or cows or something? I mean these northern boys do it so I don’t see why you can’t.”
“Catch me being a hayseed,” said Ernie.
“You don’t just ‘get them’,” said Charlie. “They’re animals. You have to know how to look after them and where to catch them and, and, well, and milk them and shear them.”
“Oh,” said Estelle. “I just thought it couldn’t be more difficult than motor-bikes and record-players and all that.” A silence fell.
“Let’s go and have a walk round,” said Kathy. “Maybe we’ll get some ideas.” They put on scarves and overcoats and clambered out of the van. The early dusk of an autumn evening settled over the whole great fair and market area. A chill wind blew a misty drizzle into their faces. It was very dark and in the distance there was a dim yellow light of some sort com
ing from a cottage window. Way on the outskirts of the area the herdsmen sat around bonfires and the smoke blew down with the rain into their faces. Sheep bleated mournfully from time to time and a cow lowed. The gang squelched off through the mud. The absence of buildings around them and of pavements under their feet made them uneasy and they kept close, which was awkward in the dark. They stumbled together and scraped each other’s ankles.
Near a bonfire a boy was milking into a pail. He had the cow’s tail tied to a piece of greasy twine which he held between his teeth. His girl was cooking meat and potatoes over the open fire. Even the smoke and the rain seemed to smell appetising.
“How much a glass of milk?” asked Kathy.
“One fag, two tins of bully or a pair of nylons,” the boy growled through his teeth.
“Too much,” said Ernie. There was no answer. The girl glanced up sharply from her cooking and snapped her fingers. A ragged collie dog slid out of the shadows and lay at her feet. The boy went on milking and there was no noise but the crackle of the fire and the regular tinny hiss of the milk jets into the pail.
“Too much,”said Ernie again. He gave the slightest of nods to Charlie who stepped forward.
“That’s it then!” shouted Ernie and kicked out at the milk bucket, knowing that the boy’s first instinct would be to clutch it and shield it. Somehow the muddy earth seemed to rise up behind him and punch him in the back and the night sky jerked round and something slammed into the side of his head. The hot stinking breath of the collie was in his face and he glimpsed Charlie’s boots kicking the snout away.
The shouting around him stopped. He heard the girl’s voice calming the whimpering dog and everyone else was silent. He got dizzily to his feet. All of the gang, girls and boys, stood with their arms yanked up hard behind their backs by a circle of silent herdsmen.
