Rosie Hogarth

by Alexander Baron

  He broke free from his own cowardice. He forced himself to repeat his words with such violence that he was as surprised as the others at the shout that came from his mouth. “I said leave him alone!” Reckless — for the only way to keep up his courage was to behave recklessly — he stepped forward and gave Bernie’s wrist a sudden, powerful twist that left Barmy free to lurch away.

  Bernie swung round to meet Jack. His face was contorted with surprise and fury. With his left fist drawn back aggressively over his shoulder he exclaimed, “I’ll bleet’n’ paralyse you!”

  Jack gave a cogitative sniff, and in a mild voice that concealed his inner agitation, replied, “Well, maybe you could, mate, and maybe you couldn’t. You can have a try if you like, though.”

  Bernie lowered his fist, but remained tensed for a blow. “Gettin’ tough in your old age, ain’t you?”

  Jack maintained his slouching, thoughtful attitude, frowning away at the bare pavement beyond Bernie. “Well, I don’t suppose I’m as tough as you, old fella. I mean, I don’t reckon I’d have the nerve to chance my arm with a heavyweight like Barmy.” He grimaced pensively. “I might take on that little dwarf that sells papers up the Angel. Or old Doddsy down Mintern Street in his wheelchair, the bloke that lost both his legs in an air raid. But Barmy — well, I mean to say, that takes a tough guy like you, don’ it?”

  Jack’s intervention had acted like a magnet on the gathering, to draw forth from it a new and different mood. There were mutters and titters of approval for Jack’s stand. People were surrounding Barmy and demonstratively consoling him. One of them put a pint glass of beer into his shaking hands. Elsie Cakebread was saying in a loud, defensive tone, “Well, we was only larking, me and Barmy. I never minded. I never thought Bernie ’d get hold of him like that. Could have hurt the poor chap, he could.” Each person now appeared anxious to show his neighbours that he was on the side of the angels. Bernie felt the stir, lowered his hands, grinned and said to Jack, “’Ere, I’ll tell you what, old son, you wanna learn to take a joke.”

  Jack knew that the crisis had passed. He considered himself lucky, that instead of the flare-up of rage and injured vanity which might have seized Bernie, there had been that moment of hesitation in which Bernie had tired of his sportive fit, felt the ebb of support among the crowd and realised the danger of a loss of popularity. He therefore contented himself with a conciliatory, “Well, it’s all over and done with now, eh?”

  Bernie clapped his arm round Barmy’s shoulder, struck a pose of masterful good nature and said, “You ain’t wild, are you, Barmy boy? A joke’s a joke, eh? All in the day’s work, ain’it? Still pals, ain’t we? Drink up and I’ll get you another pint.”

  Barmy nodded dumbly, staring into his glass. Jack said, “I reckon he’s had about enough.” He took Barmy’s arm and led him in through the private doorway of The Lamb.

  Mick called, through the hatch at the back of the bar, “What’s the matter, lad?”

  Jack explained.

  “I thought I heard voices raised,” Mick said. “Take him up to the parlour. I’ll be up myself in a minute. I’m giving Dora a hand just now.”

  In the parlour, Jack helped Barmy into an armchair and left him to recover his wits. After a few minutes of silence, while Jack was wandering about the room looking at photographs, Barmy spoke.

  “Bloody nuisance, Jack, ain’ I?”

  “Don’t be silly, mate.”

  “Better out of it. That’s me.” Barmy’s voice was tired and brittle but his speech, although disjointed, made sense. “Bloody funny —” He peered upward, as if at God “— Takes her. Leaves me. Me! Thirty years of it. Enough for anyone.” His voice rose, quavering. “Too bloody much!”

  “Away, boy, you’ll feel better.”

  “Ha!” Barmy looked up desperately. “I ain’t barmy, Jack.”

  “Of course you’re not.”

  “No. No. I ain’t.” He looked about him as if he were seeking something that might help him convince Jack. “You reckon I am. Never mind what you say. Just saying it. That’s all. You’re just saying it. Out of — out of — Look!” he began again, his voice shaking. “I come home. Out of hospital.” His eyes wandered as if he were groping for the date. As if he had given up the attempt, he pointed at Mick’s medals on the wall. “Here, that lot. The last year. I was all right. I had the shakes. You know! The bloody shakes. I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t talk a lot. I was all right. I just — Up the hospital — Year or two, they said a year or two. Needed a rest, that’s all. That’s what they said.” He lapsed into a long silence. “That woman!” he resumed in a sudden rage. “What she did. I could have —” His face twisted. “What she do it for? Didn’t she? — All them years — I’ll give her. I’ll give it her one of these nights.” His face was ugly with pain and lust. “I’ll show her!”

  “Here, steady boy, she was only larking.”

  But Barmy had forgotten his outburst. He sat, hands in his lap, mentally groping. At last he picked up the thread of his former thoughts, staring at the floor as if he were following a path in the dark, and stumbling, too, in his speech. “I come home. End of that lot.” His voice became louder again. “That bloody lot! Somebody says — barmy. Look, old Barmy. In the street. There he goes, Barmy. All the kids, run after you. Barmy!” His mouth opened and shut, but the words would not come for a second or two. “Why didn’t they? — How could I? —” He paused, defeated, and said with desperate finality, “Then you’re done for.”

  “But your family,” said Jack, “— your friends?” This was a part of Barmy’s story he had never heard. Barmy looked blank. “How old were you? When you come home?” Barmy opened his mouth, but the effort of calculation was too much.

  “He was twenty-two.” Mick had come into the room. “His mother was a widow. She had four sons. They kept themselves to themselves. You know how some folk are, respectable. The other three boys were killed in the war. Then he came home. That must have finished her. She died a couple of years after the war. He was all on his own then. Not a soul in the world to smile at him.”

  “Except for her!” Barmy’s voice rang like a challenge.

  “Except for her, God bless her.”

  “I was all right with her,” Barmy said violently.

  “I know,” said Jack. “I remember.”

  “Here,” said Barmy, “they talk about women! Them! That big ’un, that Bernie. Don’t know what a woman is. Not a real woman. Laughing at me! That tart rubbing herself against me! Women — call them women? I could tell ’em something about women.”

  “Go on down and give Dora a hand in the bar,” Mick said, “this isn’t the time of day for us to be leaving her on her own.”

  “I’ve had —” Barmy gulped, and lost his breath. “Here!” He appealed wildly to Jack. “Rag me about women, what they think? I’ve —”

  “Dora’s waiting for you,” Mick interrupted, “Go on down, boy.”

  Barmy gathered his breath, looked at them hesitantly and went out of the room.

  “I don’t know,” said Jack, “I don’t like to say, but the things he comes out with!”

  “He gets a bit wild, that’s all. I can’t say I blame him.”

  Jack sat wondering for a moment. “You’d think they’d leave him alone. I mean —” he pondered again — “They’re all right, I mean, them down there.” He waved his hand at the window. “Been all right to me, I must say. What they want to muck him about like that for?”

  Mick shrugged his shoulders. “The penny’s got to come down tails sometimes. You know, it’s not so long since your great-grand-daddy was taking the kids to Tyburn to see a hanging, or spending a happy Sunday at Bedlam having a good laugh at the loonies.”

  Jack pondered. “Well, I reckon I better be getting back for dinner.”

  “I’ll walk down to the house with you. I could do with a breath of air.”

  “Here,” Jack said as they were going downstairs, “What do you reckon? Straight up? Do you reckon
he’s really barmy?”

  “Perhaps he is by this time. I wouldn’t like to say, lad. But I do know that he needn’t have been. When he came back there was nothing wrong with him that kindness couldn’t have cured. But the first idiot that called him Barmy put a fence round him that nobody has ever pulled down. You heard what he was trying to tell you. Once he had the label on him he was finished. No friends. People talked to him kindly, but the way they’d talk to a dog. Find a wife? Woman go with a chap called Barmy? Not a chance. One year after another of that — it’s no wonder he got worse instead of better. I suppose he had a little bit of peace here and there. With Kate, with me. But what’s an hour or a day once in a while, in all that stretch of years? You try and imagine it, lad. Most of the time on his own. No company but himself. No-one to talk to but himself. All his thoughts, all his manhood, stewing and turning rank inside him. Nothing but dreams to pass the time. Is it any wonder his brainbox got addled? His mind’s lost the habit of thinking. His tongue’s lost the habit of talking. He’s got so frightened of everybody that he hates the lot of them. You know how a dog turns savage if you neglect him. That’s why he goes round glaring and muttering at everyone. His only friends are the dead folk he sees in his daydreams. You listen to him next time he goes lurching past you, and you’ll hear him talking to them. I doubt if he could pull himself together now if all the saints in heaven came down to befriend him. So there you are, Jack. If that’s barmy, then barmy he is.”

  Mrs. Wakerell came out on to the doorstep just as they arrived at the house. “Ah, there you are, Jack,” she said, “I was just coming out to give you a call. How’s the world treating you, Mick?”

  “Admirably, my love. I wish time was as kind to me as the ladies are. You know, we haven’t much longer, you and I, to add to our store of memories.”

  “Go on, you’ll get me a bad name.”

  “Well, I can honestly say you’re a little more beautiful every day, for by God, each time I see you there’s a little more of you.”

  “That’s a nice thing to tell a lady,” said Mrs. Wakerell archly.

  “My dear good lady, it’s a compliment. A man who is given to the sins of the flesh should never complain at an abundance of the raw material.”

  “That’s enough for Sunday,” she said. “You go back to your barmaid and leave an honest woman alone.”

  Jack marvelled at this passage of words. He could not imagine Mr. Wakerell ever daring to be so familiar with her. She saw his wondering smile and said, “Go on in, boy, dinner’s on the table. Toodle-oo, Mick.” She fluttered her fingers like a girl and closed the street door.

  Chapter Three

  “It doesn't seem like London, does it?”Joyce said. She looked around her. “It’s all so clean, and — oh, all that grass and flowers. I told Nancy last time, it must be like living in fairyland. All sunlit. If I lived here I’d be afraid it was a dream, and that I might wake up any minute and see dirty black walls again.”

  “Ah,” said Jack, “it’s like the bloody pictures or something.”

  “Jack, I keep on telling you. From now on you’ll give me sixpence for every b— you say.”

  “Gawd love us, can’t a bloke breathe? Bit of all right, though, ain’ it?”

  They walked hand in hand, like a pair of wondering children, across the grounds of the modern housing estate in Hackney where Nancy and her husband Tom Ollerenshaw lived. On their left rose blocks of buildings overlooking plots where lawns and gardens were being laid out. The flats had big sun windows and private balconies, each with a built-in flower bed projecting. On their right were rows of cottages, their frontages consisting mainly of glass and harmoniously-coloured tiles, each house with its private garden and many with neat porches. Children played everywhere, brown-skinned and clad in brief rompers.

  It was the end of August. Nancy had asked them to come with her to lay flowers on Chris’s grave, on the fifth anniversary of his death.

  Nancy opened the door of her flat, kissed them both and whispered, “Gran Hogarth’s inside. We asked her. Tom brought her in a taxi.” She added hurriedly, as they entered the parlour, “Tell her the baby loves her.” Joyce answered with a close-lipped little smile of understanding, Jack with a mystified, “Eh?”

  Jack crossed to where Gran Hogarth was sitting, kissed her cheek and said, “Hallo, old dear. It’s a treat to see you again.”

  Gran looked no different from any other of those tragic and indomitable old women one sees in the poor streets of London, lugging heavy shopping bags as they shuffle, step by step, upon the errands which they insist on performing until death is upon them. Their progress is an agony. Every couple of hundred yards they have to rest on a doorstep. Each step betrays their life’s defeat, yet they never admit defeat, toiling on to the last breath against their enemies, dependence and death. She was small, dressed in black and of a deathly cleanliness. She looked at the world with pale, unseeing eyes, as if she were already burdened with thoughts of things beyond it. The lifeless, cream-coloured skin of her face was seamed with horizontal folds as straight and thin as razor-cuts, between which were scored innumerable faint wrinkles. “It’s a treat you’ve done without long enough,” she said in a faded, bitter voice. “The man with the black horses could have called for me before you’d have thought of knocking at my door.”

  “Ah, you know what it is, Gran. Busy an’ all that. Meant to all the time.”

  “You could have come,” she accused. “No law agen it as fur as I know. Only the law that makes the young keep away from the old.” Her eyes filmed with self-pity. “Afraid of what you’ll see, I expect. Still, that’s the way of it. I ain’t got enough breath left to waste a lot of it complaining.”

  Jack took refuge in a fatuous smile, shook hands with Tom, ruffled Linda Jean’s curls and said, “Come and give your Uncle Jack a big kiss.”

  The child answered with a coy, “No.” She hid her face against her father’s legs, only peeping up for a moment to bestow on Jack exactly the same shamed, teasing smile that he had seen on Joyce’s face when he had pestered her for kisses. Jack uttered a high-pitched, “Ha!” of incredulous delight, and said, “See that, Tom? Not two years old? All the same, they are. Flirts from the bloody cradle.”

  “Ay,” said Tom, “she’s a smart kiddie.” He had a Lancashire accent that seemed to warm the room when he spoke. “Go to your Nannybunny.” He hoisted his daughter high into the air, gave her a great swing across the room that dispelled the fierce little look of unwillingness that had appeared on her face and dumped her on the old woman’s lap. Gran, her face creasing up into a mass of deep wrinkles and her eyes alight with anxious pleasure as she smiled at the child in her embrace, said, “Oh, my little sweet, my honey, my little golden princess. Doesn’t she love her Nanny? Isn’t she the only one that loves her silly old Nannybunny?”

  Linda Jean frowned, pouted, and struggled with the strength of a little serpent. She cried, “Down! Down! Dada, down!”

  “There!” Joyce hurried across the room and knelt at her side. “You sit on your Nannybunny’s lap like a good girl and Auntie Joycie’ll get you a sweetie. There, that’s a good girl. Give me my bag, Jack, there’s some sweets in it.” Jack, happy and startled at this new revelation of Joyce’s talents, obeyed, and in a moment Linda Jean was pacified. “There!” Joyce, still kneeling, smiled up at the old woman. “Doesn’t she love you? You’re her favourite all right, anyone can see that.”

  “Ah, she knows,” said Gran, “She knows I’m not such a fierce old woman as they give out. She knows, bless her! The little ones know. They look at you with the eyes God give ’em. Nigh upon eighty-one years I’ve trod this earth, and I’ve never yet seen the pair of eyes that didn’t have something to hide. All but the little ones, before the sin and the bitterness gets into ’em. You think I’m a silly old party, don’t you, girl? — you and your twenty-what-you-may-call-it years old? You wait till you’ve reached my time of life, then you’ll know what it is to be thankful for a
bit of love. I’ve had little but disappointment since my wedding day. It’s been all knocks, I tell you, these sixty years for me. My chap being took, then my only boy, and him crippled in the war, and worse things done to him than that, poor child. I told him, but they never listen, for they’ve got their own minds and they’re born to suffer.” She let the struggling child down. “Off you go, then,” she said, “can’t sit still a minute, can you? They will play. Well, I suppose I’ve got enough to be thankful for. I keep myself, with my pension and my annuity. I’m not obligated to a living soul for a penny. I live by myself and what’s more, I look after myself. The young lady from the Council comes of a morning and cleans for me and cooks a nice dinner for me. She’s a nice young woman, too, she looks well brought up and she’s not snobby neither. She always stays for a nice chat. Then Nancy comes, bless her. Oh, I’ve got me friends. There’s precious few can say that at my time, when everyone’s gone from them.”

  Joyce squeezed her hand and said, “Well, I’d like to be another of them, Gran, dear.”

  Tom said, “We can’t wait much longer for Alf. I’ll take baby in to the neighbours — they’re going to mind her for the afternoon — and then I’ll go for a taxi. If him and Poll’s not here by the time I get back they’ve had it.”

  He went out with Linda Jean. Nancy said, “I’ll just hang some of the baby’s washing out to air before we go. It’s a pity to waste this sunshine.” She brought a basket from the kitchen. Jack said, “Here, give us,” and took it from her. He followed her out on to the balcony, leaving Joyce talking with Gran.