Rosie Hogarth

by Alexander Baron

  Within, two voices shouted simultaneously: the female, “It’s your Jackie!”: the male, “’Old on, Jackie!” Again the woman’s voice, “Well don’t leave ’im standing there like a ’umpty-backed ’alfpenny. Let him in!” The door opened. Alf’s florid face beamed at him in bloated good fellowship. Alf pointed at Jack, opened his mouth, threw his head back and emitted a great hooting blast of laughter. When this had subsided he said, “An’ I thought you was the Never-Never! Come in, stranger.” Jack followed him into an airless and foul-smelling kitchen whose disorder was mocked by the sunlight through the closed window. Poll, Alf’s wife, said, “Hallo, Jackie. Pardon my neglidgee.” She had rouged her lips and plastered her thin, lined face with a mask of white powder; her mop of tight black curls shone as if brilliantined; but, in spite of her reported visit to the pub, she was still slippered and barelegged, and clutched a filthy pink dressing gown across her meagre chest.

  “’Ow’s the world treating you, son?” she shrilled. “Cup o’ tea?”

  Jack said, “All right. Yes please. No sugar.”

  “Don’t ask him,” Alf shouted, “give him!” Both he and his wife seemed to be under the impression that their visitor was deaf, for, having pushed him down into a chair they stood one on each side of him and bellowed at him competitively.

  There came another onslaught of noise from Alf. “What’s the news? How’s the Wakerells? Where’s your lovey-dovey?”

  Jack sat in a defensive huddle, as if beneath the impact of hurricane gusts. “All right. All okey doke. She went home get dinner ready. Sends her regards.”

  Poll fumbled in a zinc bath full of dirty crockery beneath the sink. Jack watched, benumbed, while she rummaged for a cup, rinsed it negligently under the tap, scratched a deposit of sugar from the inside with her fingernail and filled the cup with tea.

  “Here!” Jack flinched as Alf hailed his wife through an invisible megaphone. “Give him a saucer!”

  “Gah way!” she screeched back. “’E’s not a baby!”

  “’S all right,” Jack murmured, “don’t trouble. I’m cushy.” He sipped the tea, which was strong and well-brewed, but which seemed, in some mysterious manner, to have acquired a flavour of kippers, “All right, this.” He smacked his lips loudly to indicate pleasure and went on. “Got a flat. Smashing place. Up Barnsbury. Croshers, relations they are, Mrs. Wakerell, don’t think you know ’em. Moving out November. I mean them. We’re moving in. Well, like, December. Week or two get place fixed up, eh?” Bowed beneath his hosts’ uproarious intercourse, he could only manage a sort of telegraphic mumble.

  There followed a rapid blast and counterblast over his head, in increasing volume.

  Poll: “God bless yer, boy!”

  Alf: “The both of you!”

  Poll: “Bloody beano that’ll be!”

  Alf: “Right on top o’ Christmas!”

  Poll, in an ecstatic climax: “Two do’s in a month!”

  Alf nearly knocked Jack off his chair with a jovial punch between the shoulder-blades and roared, “Oohoo! Talk about a Christmas box for Joycie! Give her something she’ll never forget, eh? —”

  Poll went off into a deafening paroxysm of laughter, and, wiping her eyes, gasped, “To ’er dying day!”

  The pair of them went off into convulsions, while Jack grinned humbly up at them. He was waiting, embarrassed, for a chance to interject a few words and change the subject, but they were too intoxicated with their joke, and between the screams and chesty barks of laughter with which they filled the room, they kept adding such elaborations as, “Saving up, boy, I bet?” and (Poll), “Got enough to fill ’er stocking with, son?” and, “Who’ll put the plums in her Christmas pudden?” At last the din subsided, and Poll concluded, with a long groan of pleasure, “Ooh, talk about laugh!”

  Jack sniggered a dutiful little, “Herh! herh!” and hurriedly went on. “Yes, smashing flat. Three rooms. Kitchen. Use of bath. Twenty-five bob a week. All right these days, that is. Near the buses, handy for work an’ all. I suppose you’re looking for something else?”

  Alf answered, in a boom of surprise, “What for?”

  “Well, I mean, this gaff —”

  “Stuck up in your old age, ain’t you. Wouldn’t shift out of here for a pension. Bloody buildings, it’s nice and matey. Everyone mucks in. You can have a lend of anything you like, that’s more that you can say in Lamb Street. None of this clean curtains lark — well, some of ’em do, but at least you got the bloody option. Think I don’t remember Lamb Street? God help you if you had a dirty doorknocker down there! You come home a bit blindoh, you don’t see no-one whispering behind your back. I tell you, there’s a right barney here every Saturday night when the pubs close. Coppers keep out of the way, I can tell you. You got bloody friends here, you have, don’t hide their business from each other either. Bailiffs come for your furniture, you’ve only got to whistle and there’s ten strong men on the bloody staircase ready for all comers.”

  “Mind you,” Poll cut in, “there’s a lot trying to get out. Up the council day in and day out, nag, nag, nag. Not good enough for ’em, I suppose. Want their kids to be little lords and ladies.”

  Jack was not listening closely. A feeling of depression had come over him as he looked at Alf. He tried to catch hold of what it was that disturbed him: some memory of childhood, perhaps, that had flitted before his inner eye. How sweet and clean their life had been when they were children! How full of promise, how far removed it had been from this defeated squalor! Could this man before him — thinning hair plastered in strips like black wax across his scalp, thumbs hooked in belt scratching pleasurably with the fingers of both hands at the ugly belly which sagged out below, voice coarse and gross — could this be one of the children Kate had held in her arms? Alf had always been something of a black sheep, but at least in the old days he had been lithe and clean and eager. Jack struggled to form into articulate thoughts the realisation that was coming to him, that time decays and defeats us. From Kate’s shining kitchen to this stale scullery: ten years. The thought crushed him.

  “How’s the old job going?” Alf was asking. “Bashing up the bloody lolly?”

  “Ah,” Jack said, “Doing all right. Eight quid a week plus overtime. Save a bit on that, you can. You ought to try it, instead of pushing that old lorry around for a fiver a week.”

  “That’s what you think, son. It ain’t the wages on my job. It’s the knocksy. The bloody pickings. You know, what falls off the back of the old lorry, only it always falls into our kitchen cupboard. Crate of oranges, box of butter, jar of pickles. And all that stuff for the docks.”

  “No wonder the exports is going down,” said Poll, “Arf of ’em’s in our bloody cupboard. Talk about export or die!”

  “Well, they can bloody die for all I care,” said Alf, “help yourself out of their pockets faster than they help theirselves out of yours, that’s what I say. Sod the lot of ’em! D’you pick up much on your job?”

  “Not much,” Jack answered. “Pocketful of nails, length of timber, bit of lead sometimes you can sell for a few bob. Not a lot. Boss’s too bloody sharp, anyway.”

  Alf grinned. “Here, talking, it reminds me when we used to go pinching? Remember? All the kids from the street?”

  “Ah, that was a game all right.”

  “Our Rosie, she was the girl for that.”

  Musing over the spectacle that Alf presented, Jack was taken unaware by that single, explosive word, ‘Rosie’. He had no time to throw up his painfully-constructed defences of hostility. With Alf before him, bloated and soiled by the years, he was suddenly pierced by an anguished desire to know: what have ten years done to her? So suddenly that he wanted to rush away and find her, he felt himself swept by a terrible impatience to see her, to find out for himself. And from somewhere inside himself he heard a cry, so distinct that he heard it as a voice in his ears, thin but penetrating, ‘I love that bloody girl!’ The words throbbed through him again and again, like a pain. H
e was frightened by them. He wanted to cancel them, to unthink them, to stuff them back into the dark corner from which they had burst. Above all he was astonished by the rushing, terrifying speed with which this long-repressed mood had broken loose and overwhelmed him. Meanwhile, unable to control himself and change the subject, as he would have liked to do, he was answering Alf in a gush of enthusiasm. “I’ll say! First time I went I was hardly more than eight. Couldn’t have been more. All the kids went up Woolworths, bloody great mob of ’em. You know the old lark —” he turned to enlighten Poll — “everyone had to bring out something, and you was a sissy if you didn’t.”

  “Ah,” said Alf, “we had good times then, didn’t we?”

  “Lucky none of us ever got nabbed. Wouldn’t have been no joke, I can tell you. Bloody Borstal all right.”

  “Gah, bloody playing, that’s all we was. Bloody game it was for us then. Never had the bloody sense to pinch nothing worth while, none of us.”

  “I wasn’t half windy the first time.” Jack was speaking in a dreamy, lyrical way, drunk with the words that beat inside him like the throb of bodily love. I love that girl. I love that bloody girl. It was not yet time to silence them: for the moment he let them fill his being. Aloud, he said, “Old Rosie says to me, ‘You go on in, Jackie, like a big boy, and don’t you run when you come out, or they’ll come after you. You just walk out, quiet like, as if you never done nothing.’ Here —” his voice became confidential. Inwardly he was wondering, in agony, what have the years done to her? — “I’ll tell you what I done. I had a penny your mum had give me. I went in, and I stood in front of the counter, and I picked up a pencil. Then I got the breeze up. I thought, well, your mum wouldn’t have me round the house any more if I got caught. You know what she was for the Ten Commandments, and all that lark. Not to mention the disgrace of having a copper round the house, in Lamb Street. Well, there was me with the wind up, so I paid a penny for the pencil, and I come out, and I said I pinched it. Old Rosie give me a squeeze, and she says, ‘Look what Jackie’s got, everyone. Isn’t he a lovely big boy?’ She had a string of beads. I bet she never paid for ’em!”

  “Not her,” Alf confirmed. “What a girl! There wasn’t a bloke in the street could touch her for nerve. See her ride a bike no hands, remember? Remember her running along the top of that old factory wall in Penton Street? Twenty foot high if it was an inch, and not six inches wide. Hanging on the backs of carts, in all that traffic. Scrumping apples, remember? Dickie Bannister, he says, ‘But they ain’t ours, Rosie.’ Rosie says, ‘Anything’s yours if you take it. Besides,’ she says, ‘God didn’t put ’em on that tree for Mr. Moggeridge. He put ’em there for anyone that was hungry. And I’m hungry, Dickie Bannister, if you’re not.’ Talk about pluck! and look at in the war what she done. Mentioned in dispatches. Bloody girl! More than what you or me ever done. Bomb on the gun site. Bang! Half the roof in, bloody ammo burning and blowing up right and left, and our Rosie under the table with another girl dying in her lap, talking down the old telephone as if she was making a date for Sunday night.”

  Inwardly Jack was saying, I love that girl, for the strange pleasure of hurting himself with the words. And now he forced himself to ask a painful question, “Ever hear what she’s doing now?”

  “You know as well as I do,” said Alf. “Done all right for herself, she has. Can’t say I bloody blame her. Mean bitch though, never comes near us. I suppose she’s afraid we’ll touch her for a few quid.”

  What have the years done to her?

  “Estella’s seen ’er,” Poll began, with the delighted crow of a woman who has a choice bit of gossip to impart. “There’s another one done all right for ’erself. See ’er up the dogs we do, dressed to kill. ’Ad ’er ’ead screwed on the right way, that one. Your Chris ’adn’t been dead a year when she picked another one, and one with the money this time. Got a café up the Angel. Little gold mine, a place like that. You ought to see ’er now. Rings, dresses, motor-car. Up the dogs every week, race meetings, Brighton, Newmarket, Estella sees the world, I can tell you. I reckon if you asked ’er who Chris Hogarth was she’d say, ‘Now let me see, I’ve heard the name somewhere.’ ”

  “What about Rosie?” Jack muttered, goaded by impatience.

  “That’s what I’m telling you if you’ll let me. Well, Estella says she’s seen Rosie quite a few times — not to talk to each other, they just nod and say ’allo — she’s seen ’er in one or two of them West End night clubs, an’ in the posh seats at theatres, places like that. She’s always been with different men and she’s always been dressed like a bloody princess. And if you can’t add that lot up, Jackie Agass, you ain’t fit to go selling greens.”

  Jack said, “Ah.” After a little while he added, “Got to be going. Dinner ready. Get rowed if I’m late.”

  Without warning Alf flung out his arm, pointed at Jack, threw back his head and howled, “Yah! Get rowed if he’s late!” Poll, simultaneously, leaned back, flapped her arms and shrieked, “Listen to ’im! Get rowed if ’e’s late!” The pair of them stood screeching and shaking with laughter. “Get rowed if he’s late,” panted Alf, “that’s rich that is, that’s a good ’un if you ever heard one.” “Oh, dear, dear, dearie me,” wheezed Poll. “ ’Enpecked ’Erbert ain’t the word for it!” As Jack, intimidated by this renewed din of mirth, sidled to the door she moaned, “Ooh, we do see life, eh? Ta-ra, sweetheart! Come again soon.”

  Jack walked up City Road towards the Angel, trying to master himself. He was still bewildered by the mad flurry of feeling that had overcome him in Alf’s kitchen; but he had been off his guard then, bludgeoned with laughter. Now he was out in the streets, in the sunshine, and he struggled to suppress his thoughts as if he were ordering a rebellious dog down. What did it matter if he still had a soft spot for Rose? What man hadn’t got something like this at the back of his mind? What if he did want to know what had become of her? Was that any reason why he should seek her out and risk — and risk —? well, never mind that! In the last few weeks he had learned how to be happy. Things were going too well for him to risk his future for the sake of a shadow from the past. He was too near his goal, a home of his own, to turn back. He said to himself, again and again, as if it were an incantation, “Joyce is the girl for me.” He hastened his footsteps homeward, towards the Sunday roast.

  Chapter Two

  The summer days swooped away like swallows. Jack shut Rose out of his mind. True, she continued to annoy him, like a caller to whom one refuses to answer the door and who seems determined never to stop sounding the knocker; but the sense, which the situation bred in him, of being pestered by someone he must exclude from his life, preserved him from any further flare-up of the agony of love. He worked hard and deliberately to cultivate his relationship with Joyce, and was rewarded with a surge of boisterous happiness. When he was with her he scarcely stopped talking. Since he had little to say, his chatter was mainly nonsense, but nonsense is music to lovers and Joyce thrived on it. He took her to the Palladium, spent a wonderful day with her at Brighton, carried her off on a boat trip up the river to Hampton Court, kept her in a daze of delight with dances, gifts, home-planning conferences and elephantine flattery. Joyce, under his attentions, came to full bloom.

  Her eyes were alight, her carriage and behaviour animated, her laughter fresh and free from selfconsciousness. When she walked with him she clung to his arm, leaned on him with her whole weight and looked up into his face with wide, enquiring eyes as if she wanted him. He, in turn, caught the spark of life from her, felt flattered and glorified by her adoration and for the first time became aware of a bodily longing for her. Thus it was that, on another Sunday morning two weeks later, Jack — turned out of the house while Joyce washed her hair and ironed her dress in preparation for an afternoon’s visit to some cousins at Twickenham — found himself wandering the streets alone in a meditative mood of pleasant anticipation.

  Nothing is more restorative of optimism towards life and benevolence to
wards the human race than a walk across London on a fine Sunday morning. The city is magically transformed.

  The air seems cleaner and clearer. The streets seem broader, their pavements unblemished by scurrying waste paper. The panorama seen from each height seems wider and less dismal than on weekdays. Thousands of windows sparkle beneath the grey vistas of slate, as if even the houses are happy for a change. There is present the blessed conjunction, for one day only, of repose and enjoyed activity. The same people walk the streets as on weekdays but their faces are no longer helots’ faces. They do not congest the streets, as on working days, in a roaring, sordid, compelled stampede but walk cheerfully and with dignity. They have an air of knowing — for a change — what they are doing, of knowing and caring where they are going, and of enjoying it all. No-one is in a hurry. Thousands of people are at work on allotments and ten times as many in their gardens. Flights of cyclists swoop through the streets. The football teams are clattering off to the parks in hundreds, the morning swimmers to the pools. Young couples are on their way to the railway stations carrying rucksacks on their backs and two-handled carry-cots between them from which prodigious babies bellow. From backyards comes the roar of motor-cycles being tuned for afternoon excursions. On the public athletic tracks astonishing numbers of young people, liberated from shop and factory, are sprinting, hurdling, vaulting, flying through the air in high jumps, charging doggedly at the sandpits in long jumps, proudly lifting fantastic weights and hurling discuses about. Beefy young dockers, builders, metal-workers and clerks skim in their racing shells along the barge-cluttered, factory-lined, dirty River Lea while their coaches wobble along the towpath on bicycles bawling bawdy and indefatigable exhortations at them. It is all very beautiful: a reminder that humanity still clings to its capacity for happiness.