Rosie Hogarth

by Alexander Baron

  “Go on, silly!”

  “No kid! Six-foot wardrobe, too. I’d need a few more suits to fill that one up! Smashin’ eh?”

  “It ought to be, at sixty-eight pounds.”

  “That’s nothing. I’ve got four hundred in the bank.”

  She blurted, “I’ve got a hundred pounds saved up, too.”

  The conversation dried up again. They walked on from shop to shop, not holding hands but swaying towards each other and bumping shoulders. They argued about the merits of radio sets, wistfully admired a refrigerator, and examined crockery.

  “Look here —” Jack was deep in his own thoughts when he heard his voice rattling away recklessly — “what about it? I mean, getting wed. Could do with a place of my own, couldn’t you?” He listened to himself in wonderment. He felt numbed. “No use beating about the bush. Don’t see the sense in wasting time. I mean. Sooner the better. Been thinkin’ about it long enough. I reckon we get on all right together, eh?”

  Joyce walked on for a few paces before she answered. “We’ve hardly been going together for a month.”

  “Month? Known you half your life, I have. That’s enough, ain’ it?”

  “Not really we haven’t. Just to say ‘hallo’. And not even that for the last ten years. It’s very true what they say, too often the modern girl doesn’t take marriage seriously enough. It’s all right for these people in the papers who get divorced five or six times —”

  “Here, who’s talking about getting divorced?”

  “Well,” she persisted, “I’m only saying. It’s for a lifetime, and you ought to make sure of each other first.”

  “We can be engaged, can’t we? I mean, it’ll take a few months to find a flat. And getting some things together. Trousseau, all that caper. No harm doing things properly, I’m all for it. As long as we’ve got it settled.”

  She slipped her arm through his. “You know what I’d like, Jack? — a little house, somewhere on the outskirts. We could make a down payment and get a mortgage.” She had forgotten her own objections; and evidently she regarded the matter as so clearly settled that it was not necessary to say ‘yes’. She held on to Jack possessively, and outlined her plans to him with the unflagging clarity of a well-briefed lecturer. For the rest of their walk, while he was recovering from the shock of what had happened to him, he had little to do but listen.

  They arrived home. Mr. Wakerell was working in the garden. Joyce called, “Hallo, dad,” but did not go out to see him. “Where’s mum?” she said, looking into rooms. “She must be upstairs.” “Mum!” she called, scampering up the stairs. “Mum!” — on the landing. “Mum! —” Her voice was tremulous as she opened the door of her parents’ bedroom. Jack heard her begin, “He’s asked me!” before the door closed behind her.

  He lingered in the hall. The recklessness had deserted him. From time to time he felt a twinge of fright; otherwise he felt deflated. His mind struggled to put words together and compose a lecture to him about his good fortune, about the significance of the tremendous change that had occurred in his life, about the reward which his ruthlessness in pursuit had brought him; but from beneath there came fluttering up a flock of new doubts and questions, undefined but disturbing, to disrupt the laboured progress of his thoughts. Amid the familiar confusion there stirred a vague enquiry as to who, in the chase just ended, had been the quarry. He stamped it out. A chap always felt a bit rocky after he’d shown what he was made of; he’d learned that in the war. And by God, he decided, he’d shown his mettle this time, all right.

  Part Two

  Chapter One

  The first eight years of Jack's life were less than a memory to him; they were an oppressive background to memory, in which shadows flitted to emerge, on rare occasions, with startling clarity as figures of flesh and blood, and to disappear as suddenly, leaving only an untraceable trail of disturbed emotion.

  He retained a picture of the Orphanage building, which, photographed on to a child’s mind and enlarged by the imagination, he still pictured as a red brick fortress of terrifying vastness. Of its interior he could only remember a few corners: a classroom where he had sat staring with longing at the potted buttercups on the windowsill: a battered wall with a wicket chalked on it before which he had played cricket: a little dip in the playing field where he had hidden in the uncut grass to imagine himself free and alone, a hunter in the jungle, watching the ants crawl among the tall blades: the lavatory in which he had helped to beat another boy: the stained, wooden tables in the dining hall with the endless perspectives of little, cropped heads bent over plates; and a dark staircase leading down to the boiler-room, which he had always been frightened to use.

  He had the impression — an unjust one, perhaps — that the whole of this part of his life had been passed in a state of fright; through the shadows at the back of his mind there tramped an endless crocodile of small boys, all dressed in plum-coloured jerseys and too-short shorts, eating, studying, going off to play or to bed in disciplined ranks like troops of little soldiers, pathetically meek when they were thus marshalled, pathetically highspirited when they were running free, pathetically ferocious to the weak in their midst and pathetically grateful for the kindnesses that were doled out to them like chocolate bars. None of his preceptors had ever been unkind; but, with the exception of a Matron on whom he had lavished an extravagant and unrecognized love, they had all — the stern, the earnest, the tired, the offhanded and the hearty — moved about among the children like remote and forbidding giants.

  He had never, at the Orphanage, learned any more about himself than that he was a ‘war orphan’. This information was always given to him in a tone that discouraged further questioning. To the children in the Orphanage ‘the war’ — that earlier war which now to Jack was no more real than any other episode in schoolbook history — was not a past event but a terrible and mysterious presence. It never left them. Most of them suspected that it was still going on. A teacher once told Jack about hospital blue, and for years afterwards, whenever Jack saw Air Force men in the streets he thought that they were wounded walking out. A friend of his named Edwin Veazey, one of the few children who knew anything about their parents, used to boast, ‘My dad was gassed’, and the other boys would envy him as if he had said, ‘My dad plays centre-forward for the Spurs’. In those years — the early nineteen-twenties — the children still sometimes came across old magazines like the War Illustrated or the Penny War Weekly; they studied the pictures for hours at a time, spellbound with terror and admiration. They talked of ‘The War’ as feverishly as they talked of sex a few years later: it was fearful, wonderful and fantastic. Once Jack had written in an essay, ‘I would like to go in the War when I grow up’; another time, after looking at a picture book, he had had a nightmare, full of star-shells and huge Germans with brutal faces and saw-edged bayonets. For years the word ‘Zeppelin’ terrified him. He could not remember having speculated with any intensity about his unknown parents, or having had any feelings about them. It was only years later, passing idle hours in a slit trench in the second war, that he had wondered what lonely woman and what passing soldier had conceived him in that warweary spring of nineteen-eighteen. Why had his mother not kept him? — he asked. Perhaps — and this was the picture he let his fancy form — she was the wife of another soldier. Where was she now, and where were the men? In the summer break-through of nineteen forty-four he looked out over the tailboard of a lorry at the old cemeteries fleeting backwards, frequent as orchards, and wondered — with a touch of feeling that did not go deep enough to become pity — if his father lay beneath one of those innumerable white headstones.

  His real, remembered life began on a beach in Sussex in nineteen twenty-seven; it was to the memory of the years that followed, up to the outbreak of the second war, that he fled for refuge in moments of frustration or defeat. He did not recall in detail everything that had happened (‘After all’, Mrs. Hogarth had once said to him, turning aside some question he had aske
d her about her past life, ‘it’d take nigh on twenty years to remember everything that happened in twenty years’) but his memory — that artist in all of us which selects, arranges, suppresses, falsifies and exaggerates to create the pictures that our needs commission — presented the period to him as a series of dazzling canvases to which he returned, again and again, like a man to an art gallery, to exult, to worship and to marvel that such beauty was possible.

  In the summer of Jack’s eighth year he was staying at the holiday home which the Orphanage maintained in Sussex. This was the best time of the year for him, not only for the joy which he felt in common with all other children at going to the seaside, but because it enabled him to study at close quarters the mysterious multitudes of human beings who inhabited the world outside the Orphanage. At no other time did he have any dealings with the rest of the human race; the orphans lived so self-contained a life that it gave them a fierce pleasure even to exchange shouted insults at a distance with other small boys. Every morning on the beach he would wander away from the escorted group and squat on his heels near some family party, staring in a stunned silence at these representatives of a species to which, as far as he knew, he did not belong. His mind could not reach to envy: it erely recorded, in wonder, the astonishing spectacle of children whose freedom gave them a light-footedness which he had never before seen, of the way in which they flung themselves without fear or hesitation upon their parents’ laps, of fathers indulging in antics of which he had never imagined that any grown-up was capable. These children lacked his outward meekness, for they often approached him without fear; they also lacked his inward ferocity, and they were not provoked when he glared at them. He had often laughed and heard laughter, but never of the kind with which the beach rang on these sunny mornings. He would pass whole hours in this way, until a parent, disconcerted, would drive him away, or until — sometimes just as he was trying to pluck up courage to accept a proffered apple — his teacher would bustle up and say, “Come away, Jack, it’s rude to stare, I’ve told you before”.

  One morning he was staring at a woman and her three children when his teacher came up and took him by the hand. “Leave him be, miss,” said the woman, “he’s not doing any harm”. He stayed. The woman gave him a sandwich, addressed him as Sunny Jim and asked him his name. His lips parted and shaped the word, but no sound came forth. “Ooh,” said the woman, “the wind blew it away. You have to shout loud here or the wind blows it right out of your mouth before anyone can hear you. Listen.” She mouthed a word silently. “There! Gone flying away before anyone could hear it, eh?” Jack uttered a hooting little laugh. “Now,” the woman said, “try it again, quick, while the wind’s dropped.” Jack barked, “Jack!” as if he were answering a roll-call. He stared at her for a moment, then laughed loudly, and all the children joined in. “Well,” the woman said, “this is Alf, this is Chris, and this one under the deckchair — come on out, you little puss — is Rose. Now off you go, all of you, and let me have a nap.”

  For the rest of his holiday he played with the family — the Hogarths, as he soon learned — every day. Mrs. Hogarth fed him, bought him ices, dried his feet when he had been paddling and took him one evening, with his teacher’s permission, along with her own family to the concert on the pier. He learned that they lived in London, and that there was an older girl, Nancy, who had not come because she was fourteen and had started work in a tobacco factory. Rose told him, as if she were matching a boast of his when he said that he had no parents, that their father was dead. Jack hung about the Hogarths with passionate devotion, happy to the point of hysteria yet sick with dread at the thought that soon he must part from them. Mrs. Hogarth’s affection for him became more plain every day. He learned from the children that a little brother of theirs, Tony, had died three months before. “He’s gone away to daddy,” said Rose, who was five years old. Chris, pale, bespectacled, bronchial and thirteen years old, explained when her back was turned, “She don’t know, he’s dead, she’s too young. He got pneumonia.” Years later Mrs. Hogarth was to open her heart to him. “I was fit to die myself that summer,” she said, “I couldn’t forget him, so little, and his big eyes and his cheeks on fire. Trouble is, I was afraid I’d make the kids miserable, too. It was Mick put me up to going away for a week with them. Best thing I could have done. I can’t tell you what it meant when you walked up to us. Lonely little mite you were. You might say I had room for you —” she touched her breast — “here”.

  When the time came for the Hogarths to go home Jack begged, “Take me with you, missis,” and Mrs. Hogarth, embracing him, told him, “Don’t you fret, my love. It won’t be many days before we see each other again.” She kept her word. Every week she came to visit him at the Orphanage. She and the children sent him letters, postcards, parcels; he had toys of his own, sweets, cakes and clothes in such quantities that the Orphanage authorities had to intervene. For months Mrs. Hogarth tried to get permission to adopt him. She obtained letters of recommendation from the vicar, paid a solicitor to represent her and once brought Mick Monaghan (it was the first time Jack saw him) to speak for her before the Governing Board. Her efforts failed: a poor widow with a family of four was not considered a fit person to adopt a child. When Jack was a little older, however, he was allowed to visit the Hogarths at weekends. His whole life changed. He became more talkative, and among his fellow-orphans he would boast shamelessly about his friends and the delights he enjoyed in their home. He explored the house in Lamb Street as if it were a magic castle. He made friends among the neighbours. Every time he came Mrs. Hogarth filled the house with children and treated them to sumptuous tea parties. He learned to call her ‘mum’, and to squabble with the children as if he were their brother. When he was fourteen his status in the family was confirmed. The orphans, on reaching the school-leaving age, were boarded out with approved families. Mick Monaghan, who for years had been playing the squire in Lamb Street, secured him an apprenticeship with a shopfitter in Clerkenwell, and he moved in with the Hogarths.

  He remembered the family party that had greeted him when, with his cardboard suitcase, he came at last to stay in that house which to him was a dazzling and beautiful shrine of laughter and — above all — of freedom. There was Chris who, at nineteen, was the educated man of the family, a clerk at thirty-two shillings a week; his girl, Estella Leone, who was as buxom and swarthy as he was thin and pale; Alf, seventeen and pugnacious, a lorry-driver’s mate who shouted his way through every conversation as if he were abusing a motorist in a traffic jam; Rose, a little demon in a drill slip; the oldest girl Nancy, fat as a sack of melons, shining with laughter, and deputy mother — on this occasion she was serving them at table; and Mrs. Hogarth, facing him across the round table, her face bright with tenderness and gratification.

  When he thought of Mrs. Hogarth he could not recall her as she was when he had last seen her, during the war — the lineaments of the beloved dead vanish too quickly from our minds — but he retained a mental picture of her as she was on this day, sixteen years ago, a picture which like the central figure in an old photograph grew unnaturally distinct as its background faded. He remembered her as a child sees its mother, ageless (although she was only forty-one at the time), the embodiment of womanliness yet without sex, radiant and majestic, tireless in movement, classically placid in repose; broad of lap, powerful of bosom, her arms red and strong, her dark hair swept thickly back from a full face.

  Her cheeks were as smooth and delicately coloured as those of a girl and, although the slight snubness of her broad nose gave her a cast of expression so ineradicably good-humoured as to make her appear an over-tolerant mother, the omniscient candour of her eyes was as effective in governing the children as it was in silencing a quarrelsome neighbour. Her voice could range from a melodious softness to the firmness of anger, and when she sported like a child with her children it became tremulous with glee, but it was never strained or shrill; her speech was clearly articulated, full of the cheerfu
l accents of the London dialect but free from the slurred and fragmentary rhythms of modern Cockney. Whenever Jack heard laughter he compared it with her laughter; laughter was never absent from her house. Her parties — would he ever forget them? — but every meal was like a party in her house! How she loved to see her children, in their adolescent years, come stampeding in with their friends, to sing and clown and thump the piano, while she presided, smiling like a queen, at her well-stocked table!

  She would open the door to a tired hawker and bring him in to dinner. Once she bribed Jack with a Banbury bun to hit a boy four years older than himself who had called him a bastard. The boy’s mother came to the house, spoiling for a fight. Mrs. Hogarth confronted the woman with cold and fearless eyes, said, “Who? This little lamb —” she fondled Jack’s head — “hit a boy twice his size? I don’t believe it. And I must say, if a boy of mine came crying to me, I’d be ashamed to make it known,” — and slammed the door. She appointed herself as guardian and comforter to Barmy Naughton, who, ever since he had been fished out of the Atlantic in the winter of nineteen-seventeen thirty hours after his ship had been torpedoed, had wandered about the district like a homeless and tormented dog. For years he was a familiar visitor to the house, slinking in whenever he felt like it, sitting silently by the fire, eating at the table in a famished but furtive way, or helping Kate Hogarth in the kitchen where, free from the agony of facing derisive eyes, he talked for hours with the disjointed volubility of a child. Kate encouraged him to take the children out for walks and compelled them to treat him with respect. In her hearing they had to address him as Uncle Dick, although long usage had already left him scarcely responsive to any other name but Barmy.