Rosie Hogarth

by Alexander Baron

Jack peered up into the green gloom of a big sycamore tree that grew just inside one of the front gardens and leaned across the pavement. “Can’t see nothing.”

  “It’s a kitten,” Joyce explained, “oh, a poor darling tiny little pussy.”

  People were trying to call the cat down, prowling and meowing round the base of the tree as if they had themselves all suddenly been transformed into enormous and amorous tomcats. A huge builder’s labourer was mewing in a treble key of incredible altitude. An Armoured Corps sergeant stood in a strange devotional attitude, with both arms raised above his head, rubbing his fingertips together and bellowing in a monstrous caterwaul, “Waooow, myooooo, oy, down here, this way, Waaaohw!”

  Joyce and Jack heard little conversational groups forming all round them. In some, the main theme was sympathy, “Ah, poor little mite, look at it, half-dead with fright!” In others, indignation was paramount, “They ought to make people look after ’em, that’s what I say, same as dogs, or children. Wouldn’t like to see one of your kids up there, would you?” In others, reminiscence raged, “This is nothing. Remember when Doctor Naidoo’s monkey broke loose? Five days he led ’em a dance up there on the roofs. Helped himself to everything he wanted out of the houses. I saw him one day perched up on a chimney pot waving a pair of bloomers. Who says they’re not human?”

  Advisers abounded. One man kept shouting, “Find out its name. You’ll never get it down till you do.”

  A woman came running out of a house bearing a frying pan in which were a pair of kippers still sizzling. “My dinner these are,” she announced, holding the frying pan up seductively beneath the cat, “Hey, pussy pussy, here pussy pussy, come down and eat lovely kippers. Pussy pussy pussy pussy!”

  “It’s the breeze,” said a man, “he can’t smell ’em.”

  “Flap your jacket,” someone shouted, “send the smell up!”

  Another voice, “’E’s got the breeze-up already!”

  The cat, a little ball of grey fur, glared down from thirty feet above in terror and defiance.

  Some boys began to throw stones. Jack shouted, “Here, the poor little bleeder ’ll fall down if you frighten it.” A bald-headed man past whose ear Jack had shouted turned, glowered in mute resentment and returned to his attitude of contemplation. The boys went on throwing stones.

  A fresh altercation broke out above. The householder whose garden had been invaded by the crowd was protesting volubly and calling for the police. There were shouts of, “Shut him up!” “Break his windows!” “Put his lights out!” A woman kept screaming, “Heartless brute!” and the householder retreated over his trampled flowerbeds with the bricklayer’s labourer shouting after him.

  A bull-terrier arrived and rushed at the tree in one frantic leap after another, barking and growling in a blood-curdling manner. A woman let out an apprehensive wail of, “Oh Gawd!” as if her only baby were at the top of the tree. The boys began to stone the dog. The dog’s owner arrived and dashed in among the boys, laying about him with his leash. For yards around the crowd dissolved into an angry swirl, amid a hubbub of yells, scuffling feet and ferocious barking.

  Jack said despairingly, “Here, this is a right turnout. What about the poor old cat?” Nobody took any notice.

  Joyce realised, with a sinking heart, that he was not the sort of man who could dominate in a crowd.

  More shouting behind them. A six-ton lorry and trailer had come to a standstill in the crowd and the driver was leaning out of the cab exchanging insults with the spectators. A car pulled up behind the lorry and sounded its horn repeatedly, and the noise, already deafening, was augmented by a tremendous and prolonged chorus from the crowd of, “shu-u-u-RUP!”

  A voice was still repeating, “Find out ’is name, I tell you!”

  “It’s Mrs. Ballard’s Tibbles.”

  “No it’s not. Tibbles ’as got a white spot on his nose.”

  “Well, so has this one.”

  “Garn, you can’t see from here.”

  “Who can’t?”

  “You can’t.”

  “Who says I can’t?”

  “I say you can’t.”

  “Wanna make something of it?”

  “Here!” Jack pulled his jacket off, thrust it into Joyce’s arms, pushed the bald-headed man aside and scrambled up on to the pavement. “Mind out the way,” he shouted, “too much bloody wind and water round here.” Joyce said to herself — her weak and shaken voice had no chance of reaching him — “Your best suit!” and watched, dumbfounded, while Jack made his way into the front garden, climbed the railings and tried to get a foothold on the tree-trunk. He could not get a purchase, and the lowest branch was out of his reach. “Here,” he appealed, “give us a bunk-up, someone.” The bricklayer’s labourer climbed up on to the railings and leaned forward against the tree. “’Ere! Ow! Stuff a duck!” he yelled as Jack scrambled up him and planted both feet on his shoulders. “Take your time, mate! No ’urry! Don’t mind me, I’m only the bloody doormat, I am!” Jack got both hands round the branch and pulled himself up, to the accompaniment of a loud and sarcastic, “Hooray!” from the crowd.

  Joyce was dazed with incredulity and pride. She could hardly believe that Jack had left her side, it had all happened so quickly. She could feel her heart fluttering, and she cried, “Oh, Jack! Oh, Jack!” less out of anxiety for him than to draw the crowd’s attention to the fact that she was his companion. He went crashing up through the green tangle, making a lot of noise and little progress. She could see him struggling time and again to free his clothes, his face scarlet with the heat and screwed up with embarrassment each time he halted, baffled, in the crook of a branch. The crowd was divided between approbation and derision. From here and there, a cry arose of, “Go it, mate!” “Good boy!” “That branch on the right!” “No, not that one, it won’t stand your weight!” A group of youths sent up a monotonous chorus of, “Git ON wiv it!” A small boy put his fingers down his throat and warbled, “Oolooloolooloolooloo! I’m Tarzan the Ape Man!” Other people took up the cry, “Go on, Tarzan!” Jack sat on a branch and grinned stupidly down at them. A voice roared, “Chuck us down a coconut, Jacko!” and again, “Take yer shoes orf and ’old on wiv yer toes!” There was a perilous rustling from above as the cat retreated along its branch. Jack appealed to it with conciliatory noises and finger-tip-rubbing. He almost lost his balance, and the crowd sent up a derisive cheer.

  A woman said, “Making an exhibition of himself, that’s all he’s doing! Fancy getting up there for a cat! Vermin, that’s all they are. I’d drown the lot.”

  Joyce flamed with feminine fury but, obstinately ladylike, she checked herself and ejaculated a loud, “Huh!”

  The woman turned on her. “Who you ha-ing at, Lady Love-a-Duck?”

  Joyce answered with a demonstrative toss of the head and the withering remark, “Some people!”

  “Some people are as good as some other people,” the woman retorted, “some people want to put that in their pipe and smoke it!”

  “Huh!”

  “Don’t you huh me, or I’ll have your hair down, double quick, I tell you!”

  “I can huh if I like.”

  “Not at me you can’t!”

  “Oh?” Joyce forgot about being a lady and became a woman rampant in defence of her man. “Who’s going to stop me?” she shouted, “You and whose army?”

  Somebody shouted, “He’s got it!” Joyce looked up, and saw Jack sitting astride the topmost branch, with the kitten squirming in his right hand. He unbuttoned his shirt and stuffed the kitten inside. She saw him grimace, and he shouted, “Here, he’s christened me!” Laughter and more cheers from the crowd.

  He climbed down, his descent even less impressive than the upward journey. When he was half-way down, the crowd began to thin out as those who had been hoping for broken bones drifted, disappointed, back to their houses. There was a subdued babble among the rest and a few claps, but nobody showed much inclination to give Jack a hero’s welcome. The
show was over. He dropped to the ground. The bricklayer helped him to his feet.

  A voice, “Good boy!”

  Another, “Give ’im a peanut!”

  Another, “Give ’im a pennorth and sod the expense!”

  Another, “Wait till your mum sees you!”

  His face was covered with scratches, his clothes torn, his hands filthy. He came limping back to Joyce, and she cried, “Oh, Jack, you are a sight.”

  He produced the kitten from inside his wet shirt. “Here he is,” he said, fondling the creature, “pretty little nipper, isn’t he? I reckon we might as well keep him after all that caper.”

  The bald-headed man turned round. “Here,” he said, “that’s my cat if you don’t mind!” He lifted the kitten out of Jack’s hands and walked away.

  “Well,”Joyce gasped, “Some people!”

  Jack’s grin was more shamefaced than ever. He looked as if he wanted to escape from her as well as from the crowd. “Never mind!” she said. She hooked her arm through his and steered him proudly homeward, with the air of one displaying a prize exhibit, through what remained of the crowd.

  Chapter Four

  The block of flats on the bombed site was growing in a manner that was almost mystifying. All day long the workmen would lounge about among the heaps of bricks and cement, with little visible sign of progress to the casual passer-by; but each evening, when the site was deserted, the red walls were seen to have sprung a little higher, like some mysterious and geometrically-proportioned plant that grew of its own accord in the rich sunshine. Most people watched its growth with complacent interest, but Jack could never rid himself of a vague feeling of hurt as the traces of the old houses, the last visible memorial to his own past, were progressively obliterated.

  It was a Sunday afternoon, the last day of July, and he was leaning on the lamp-post at the street corner, smoking a cigarette and staring at the site with half-seeing eyes. Back in the house Mrs. Wakerell and Joyce were busy preparing for a ceremonial visit from Joyce’s brother Fred and his wife. The occasion was an important one; Mrs. Wakerell was proud of her daughter-in-law, and every effort must be made to impress her. Jack had decided to keep out of the way for as long as possible. He was frightened of Gwendoline. The first time he had met her he had made the mistake of calling her Gwen, and she had said frigidly, ‘Gwendoline’. She had made him feel that she did not regard him as a particularly brilliant candidate for the honour of being received into the same family as that which she had entered, and he dreaded the coming evening.

  Perhaps it was this little impulse of fear that sent him to the familiar refuge of memory; perhaps it was the sight of the young boys of the street trooping off in a happy, noisy gang to the swimming baths or of the beautiful young girls swooping round and round the block on their bicycles, making him feel young at first, then terribly old. Staring at the new red walls, he tried to reach back once again to the life that lay beneath their foundations. The past, the beautiful past, was vanishing into the mists. Every day it became more difficult to reach. When had the gap begun to open out? Not with this building — it was only the tombstone on an existing grave. Not even when the bomb had dropped. It was the war — the war — that was when his life had been sheared in two and all that he treasured had run away like an uncoupled railway wagon.

  September, nineteen thirty-nine. Until then, ‘the war’ had meant the other war; one-legged men playing barrel organs in the street, the boozy bragging of the middle-aged men in The Lamb, two minutes of embarrassed silence every Armistice Day, and the picture of Kate Hogarth’s dead husband on the parlour wall. How the children used to boast in the street! “Our dad was killed in the war, yours wasn’t!” “Yours wasn’t prop’ly,” would come the reply. “Well,” Rose — or Chris, or Alf — never Nancy — would insist, “he was as good as. He was crippled. He died four years after. Our mum used to wheel him about in a chair. She gets a pension from the King, every week.” The picture on the wall; like the face of a stranger, an intruder looking in at a window, it had fastened its fixed and unrecognizing stare on them for years. Its presence had always made them uneasy. Rose, of course, had never known her father; Nancy remembered him well; the two boys pretended to, but they had been too young at the time of his death for him to be any more than a phantom in their memories. They had often pestered Kate with questions about him. “Mum, did our dad kill any Germans?” “Mum, did dad win any medals?” But Kate would only answer with a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ and a shadowed smile. What a deadly grief must have sealed her lips, Jack thought, remembering — for she had never spoken of her husband, never told the children about him during all those evenings when she fascinated them with stories by the fire, never even looked up, to the best of Jack’s recollection, at the picture: he suddenly remembered the way in which she would walk past it, quietly, as if she were afraid to attract its attention. She had never even — the thought came as one of those bolts which flash from the unconscious to burst in the conscious memory — she had never even, now he came to think of it, taken the children to the cemetery with flowers for their father’s grave. And it had never even occurred to the children, so remote was their father from them, so entirely a legend, to ask to go; not even Nancy, in Jack’s time, had ever thought of it; not even Nancy, who remembered her father well and who was as silent about him as her mother. Jack sighed, perplexed by this new loose end traced in the threads of his memory. He must ask Nancy about that some time.

  Yes, it was the war that had done it. The war, then the bomb, now this new red block growing inexorably towards the day when new people would swarm in and kill the last dying echoes with the din of new life. Day piled upon day, separating human beings from what they loved and driving them towards what they feared; one course of bricks appeared upon another, and the wall sprang up, a visible symbol of what could not be stopped.

  “Jack!”

  The voice came to him at last. “Ja-ack! Jackie Agass, how many more times have I got to call you?” It was Mrs. Wakerell, leaning out of the upstairs window. “You come in at once!” As usual, she addressed him as if he were a small boy. “I don’t want you wearing that sweaty collar when Gwendoline comes. I’ve put out a starched one for you, and the new tie Joyce bought you.” He went, feeling as helplessly resentful as he always did when she treated him in this way, but strangely relieved at the breaking of the spell which had lain upon him.

  The visitors arrived at five o’clock. Gwendoline, a tall thin girl who seemed to think it necessary to face the world with a perpetual expression of genteel severity, marched into the parlour first, saluted Mrs. Wakerell and Joyce with perfunctory kisses, and swept the menfolk with a comprehensive and contemptuous glance. Fred cut straight across the room to his father; his subdued face was lit by a smile of astonishing eagerness and delight, which his father returned.

  “Hallo father, how are you keeping?”

  “In the pink, Fred.” Mr. Wakerell’s voice and movements seemed to have come to life, as if he had emerged from the invisible hermitage within which he usually lurked. “How are you getting along?”

  “Mustn’t grumble.”

  “Mustn’t grumble?” Mr. Wakerell sighed and looked at the floor, grimacing thoughtfully with his lower lip. “Yes, that’s about the size of it with all of us, I suppose.”

  “I’ve brought you another book. Wonders of the Ocean Bed. Have you finished the other one yet?”

  “Marvels of Astronomy? Yes, I’ll give it to you before you go. Some wonderful facts in that, wonderful. It says in that book, if the sun’s heat went down — er —”

  “— Three per cent.”

  “That’s right — every living thing on earth would die.”

  “Cheerful, ain’t you?” interrupted Jack, his voice roughened by embarrassment at the crossfire of learned conversation in which he was caught.

  “It’s all right,” said Mr. Wakerell, “there’s time for you to get married. They don’t reckon it’ll happen for — how long w
as it, Fred?”

  “A hundred and fifty thousand million years.”

  “Ah, I knew it was somewhere round about that.”

  “What you read all that stuff for?” Jack asked. “It don’t help pick any winners.”

  Mr. Wakerell sank back into his chair as if retreating into his hermit’s cell. He pondered, and when he spoke again, his gruff voice seemed to be coming from a dark doorway. “Takes your mind off things.” He paused. “You need something to take your mind off your work when you stand eight hours a day in a warehouse counting cardboard cartons. Twenty-seven years I’ve been at it: sixteen years packing ’em, and eleven years inspecting other people pack ’em. Eight hours a day, five-and-a-half days a week, fifty-one weeks a year. For twenty-seven years. Chap once said to me, it’s not work, it’s life-wasting. That’s what he said. I reckon you have to learn to be two men if you want to hold down a job like that; one man keeping an eye on the cartons and the other — well —”

  “Off to the moon, eh?” said Fred. He asked Jack innocently, “Don’t you read much, then?”

  Jack, lost in his own thoughts, had scarcely been listening. “Who? Me?” He made a noise that sounded like, “N’yah!”

  There was another pause. Fred, wondering how to keep the conversation going, asked, “You interested in anything special?”

  “Interested? Me?” Jack sounded indignant. “I work for a living, I do.”

  “What do you think I do? Pick petals off daisies?”

  “Well, I mean,” Jack scoffed, “teaching!”

  Mr. Wakerell’s voice rumbled up from secret places as he came to his son’s defence. “It’s hard work, teaching. And it’s good work, too. That’s more than the likes of me can say.” He frowned down at the floor as if black depths opened at his feet.

  Jack uttered a vague mumble of apology. He had not meant to slight Fred’s profession, which he really held in awe. An ‘educated boy’ was like a sacred cow in Lamb Street. He had been stung by a feeling of inferiority, and by resentment at the way in which the conversation impeded his private thoughts.