Rosie Hogarth

by Alexander Baron

  Mick asked, “Another drink?”

  “I’ll get it myself.” She crossed to the sideboard, filled her glass and, leaving it where it stood, began to pace restlessly back and forth with her arms hugged across her chest. “You say what’s wrong is that I’m young.” She was not looking at Mick, but was frowning at the carpet. “Perhaps yours is that you’re old. You’re a defeatist. You don’t believe people can be changed for the better. I do.” She turned to face him, and stood looking proudly down at him. “Look here, I’ll tell you something. You had a jolly good slam at me, didn’t you? Well, I’ll do something you’ve not been willing to do — I’ll concede you a point. I’ll admit I’ve got my faults, and I‘ll admit you’ve put your finger on some of them. It’s true I’m ambitious. It’s true I’ve got no special ability. It’s true I want the best out of life. What do you want me to do, love the whole human race and leave myself out? But this is what you don’t understand — the road I’ve taken is the only one that can help me get the better of my faults. Any other way — go on, tell me any other way a girl like me, poor and pretty, tries to get out of the rut — any other way, my faults would have got the better of me, and double-quick, too, I can tell you! How many girls have gone to the bad, who were like me at sixteen? Plenty, and you know it. I could go down on my knees and thank the Party for what it’s done for me. And I know this, too, that the harder I work to change the world for the better, the quicker I’ll change myself for the better. When you see tremendous achievements and tremendous sacrifices, it’s easier not to be vain. When you see real hope for everybody you don’t want so much to grab for yourself. The world opens out wider every day, and there’s more to look at than yourself in the mirror.”

  “By God!” Mick thumped his knee. “Look who’s talking!”

  “Well, that’s my answer to you, Mick Monaghan, and in time you’ll see that I’m right. And the same goes for everybody else. You walk about the streets of this town, and ask yourself what’s wrong with it. I don’t suppose you ever did. I do. See the people swarming in the streets, pushing and shoving and jostling each other off the pavements, look into all those white miserable faces, all hurrying and worrying. See the dirt and the ugliness, all those catchpenny adverts screaming at you, and the kids at the corners learning how to waste their time — that’s all they’ll ever have to do, except work, till they die. Everybody’s a stranger. Nobody cares about his job, it’s just eight hours a day taken from him, a third of his lifetime. You see them all crawling about as if they’ve lived for generations cap in hand, and so they have, begging for the jobs they hate. Go and watch them flocking to the dog tracks, and queuing up in the drizzle for rotten Yankee films. Think of all the joy that’s stored up in books and plays and pictures and music, it might not exist for all they know. How many of them will ever see the Lakes, or the Avon, or the Dales, or the Cotswolds, before they’ve lived out their poor starved lives? No wonder it’s a nightmare!”

  “So it is,” Mick said. “The bloody place is too big. God didn’t make us to live packed like fleas in a barrel.”

  “That’s not the point of it. It’s the sheer terrifying, miserable, dreadful lack of purpose that poisons life. That’s the horror. It matters more than material conditions — they’re bad enough, though they keep improving, but they’re not the root of the matter. It’s the emptiness, the lack of meaning, having nothing more to do once you’re born except while away the time as painlessly as possible till you die. Give life a meaning, and everything changes. Listen — one day, when people walk this city, they’ll be the owners of everything they look on. Every day, when they go to work, they’ll know they’re working for their own good and the common good. Then they’ll walk the streets as if the streets belong to them. Their faces will be changed, because their minds will be changed. The word ‘neighbour’ won’t just mean the man next door, but everyone they pass in the streets, the crowds won’t be made up of strangers and rivals any more. People will be secure at heart, because their jobs will be secure and peace will be secure — and it will be, we’ve won half the world already and we’re going to win the other half. No more penny arcades. Children will be educated to enjoy life to the last drop, not just to be office boys and fill in the pools coupon. The world won’t end at the end of your street — people will travel, and they’ll come back richer in heart. That’s how we’ll change people. Well,” she ended a little truculently, “what have you got to say to that?”

  Mick studied her with a sombre and compassionate smile. “Drink up your brandy, girl. If that’s what you really believe, I’m not going to say a thing. You talk as if you don’t know about all the people before you who’ve dreamed the same dream as you, and to get it they’ve built and built, organised and organised, disciplined and disciplined, punished and punished, and then they’ve woke up to find themselves in a prison twice as grim as the one they were in before.”

  She turned back to get her drink. “You’re old,” she mocked, “your eyes are getting dim.”

  “They can still see farther than yours, thank God! I’d like to think you’ll wake up from this dream before it’s too late. You’ve done it before, you know. You’ve chopped and changed, put your heart and soul in something, and forgotten it a year later. I fancy you haven’t changed so much. You’re still restless, you still stride about and look about you as if there’s something you haven’t found yet. Don’t be so sure what you’ll be in a few years time.”

  “No!” The intensity of her protest was almost agonized. She clenched her fist and banged it on the sideboard again and again. “No, no, no! Not now! Not this time! You don’t know what it used to be like. Every day that passed, I felt I’d lost a chance to do something tremendous. Every single morning I woke up, I used to say, ‘What is it, where is it, what’s the thing that I have to do, how do I come to life?’ It used to gnaw at me. Not any more,” she cried, her expression one of distress. “I have certainty now. I have confidence. I tell you this is for keeps.”

  Mick nodded, and left her to herself till she had recovered. A little later he said, “To change the subject, when are you going to marry again?”

  “Why should I?”

  “It might bring you down to earth. What’s stopping you?”

  “Where’s the man?”

  “What man are you looking for?”

  “The man I can respect.”

  He was smiling again, but gently. “There you go again. There’s nothing to be done with you. There’s no such animal. Don’t get me wrong, girl. It’s not because you’re too good for them, it’s because you’re too conceited. Well, don’t leave it too long. Ten years go quickly, especially when you’re having a good time, and all of a sudden you’ll find you’re going hard. You’ll start turning into one of those handsome hags I’ve seen too often — the dashing young women of yesterday. All wit and no laughter. Everlastingly busy outside and a bit lonely inside. You watch out, my old girl.”

  “A pretty picture,” Rose laughed. “I’m terrified. You’d better give me another drink to reassure me.” She went back to her chair. “What would you like me to do? Marry Jack Agass?”

  “I wouldn’t advise that. Not for your sake or his. He’ll be happier with the one he’s got.”

  “With her? I wish him joy. Imagine going to bed with that female suet pudding!”

  Mick grinned. “Don’t be so sure. If she’s anything like her mother, he’s got a warm time ahead of him.”

  “Oh? And what do you know about her mother?”

  “A gentleman never tells.”

  “Oh, Mick, Mick, you old ram!” She lay back in her chair, quivering with merriment. “I can’t help loving you. Is there any woman in this street you haven’t been at?”

  “Quite a few, unfortunately. But I reckon I’ve got ten good years ahead of me yet.”

  Laughter made her cough. She steadied herself, and raised her glass. “We’ll drink to that. To your ten good years!”

  “And I’ll drink to yo
u! Which ‘you’ is the real one, the one you see or the one I see? Here’s hoping I’m wrong!”

  Rose’s eyes were bright. “Idiot! Oh, what a pair we are to be lecturing each other!” Father and daughter touched glasses and drank.

  Chapter Five

  Jack spent the next week at home recovering from his burns. He went several times to the hospital, to have his dressings changed and to visit Bernie, who was making good progress but who would require some minor plastic surgery before he was ready to face the world again.

  Visitors thronged the Wakerell house every day. Relatives called to sympathise and congratulate, and to bear back to their own homes the excitement of having had tea with someone whose name had been mentioned (to the extent of four lines in a column of ‘news briefs’) in the newspapers. Neighbours came, bringing fruit, milk, cigarettes, eggs, magazines and lamb chops for Jack. They all subscribed lavishly to the collection, launched by Mick, for a wedding present; and, fulfilling Mick’s prediction, they gave even more generously to buy a huge wreath for Barmy’s funeral. On the night of his burial there was such a warmth of sentimental recollection generated in the saloon bar of The Lamb that twice the usual quantity of beer was called for to assuage it. Several of the women became maudlin, and many a soulful tribute was uttered, until Mick Monaghan was callous enough to turn all the mourners out ten minutes before closing time.

  Jack was diffident and resentful at the public homage but Joyce revelled in it. Her accounts of Jack’s heroism to the girls at work grew more fervid every day, and she came home early every evening after informing Madame Sophie, “I must be by his side. He needs me,” as if he were hovering between life and death. Her mood towards him had finally thawed. She was loving, but there was none of the anxiety or pleading in her attentions that there had once been. She walked with him wherever he went, or stood behind his chair when he received visitors, with something of her mother’s haughty serenity of carriage. Alone with him she was affectionate, sometimes gleeful, but never humble. When they discussed the final plans for their wedding she listened to his ideas attentively but lazily, and announced her own point of view with the calm certainty that it would prevail. To her mother — who throughout the week was beside herself with glory, ushering in visitors, bragging to them, pouring tea for them, drinking innumerable nips of gin with them and popping more lumps of sugar into her mouth than she had consumed in the last month — she displayed a patronising friendliness that sealed Mrs. Wakerell’s defeat in the household.

  Now that the quarrel was receding in Jack’s memory, his remorse evaporated and he was no longer abject to Joyce. The old boisterousness crept back into his attitude to her, but beneath it there was always a hint of apprehension, expressed in ostentatious gestures of respect.

  Inwardly he felt empty and saddened, but relieved. He discovered, with a vague wonderment, that he loved Kate no less for what he now knew about her. She had been a holy picture in his memory, an image worshipped but flat and unreal. Now she lived there as a woman, and he was warmed by the sense of all she had given him, as a man is when he realises what of himself has been the gift of women. He felt her loss more sharply than before. He even had moments of elevation when he wanted to see the world through her loving eyes. But he was free of her, for the warmth in him had awakened him to Joyce, the living woman, and through Joyce to the living world. The past had stood between him and the present. He had taken refuge in illusive memory, and its drugging comfort had made the present, with its problems and tribulations, yet harder to face. It had given him false standards and a false vision of people. Disillusioned now, his only conscious awareness was of loss and an inability to focus, but even in his emptiness of heart there was the feeling of freedom, of a burden lifted.

  One evening, in the darkened parlour, he asked Joyce, “D’you reckon we’ll get on all right?”

  “Oh!” The exclamation was full of scorn. “There’s a silly question!”

  “It’s a fine time we’ve picked to get married, you know. All sorts of trouble on the way.”

  “There always is. I reckon the sky’d fall in if there wasn’t.”

  “Wars an’ all that.” He studied her unmoved profile in the darkness. “You don’t seem worried.”

  “Why should I? Everything’s going to be lovely.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because.”

  “Because what?”

  “Because my Easter bonnet with all the ribbons on it. You think too much. Brains fry well with breadcrumbs. That’s all they’re good for.”

  “Go on, you’re daft.”

  “Well, that makes two of us.”

  Jack drew the curtains, shutting the lamplight, and the street noises, and the world, and the future, out of their thoughts. What was to be, they could not tell. All they knew was that, in alliance, they would always be able to make the best of a bad job. That was what made their world go round.

  Other books by Alexander Baron

  King Dido

  Introduction by Ken Worpole

  1911, London. The police collaborate with racketeers to keep an uneasy peace, periodically broken by violent gang wars. Dido Peach comes to prominence by breaking the unwritten rules of the street. For a brief time he rules the underworld. His fall is spectacular, shaking even the callous and vicious neighbourhood in which he is trapped.

  New London Editions

  paperback: 9781905512812

  ebook: 9781907869846

  From the City, From the Plough

  Introduction by Sean Longden

  The story of soldiers of the Fifth Battalion, the Wessex Regiment in the run up to and after D-Day. Although fictional, it comes directly out of the author's own experience, and is one of the most accurate and unsentimental portrayals of the ordinary soldier's life anywhere in fiction. The prose is spare and crisp, sometimes chilling but alive to the humour and humanity of soldiers at war.

  Black Spring

  paperback: 9780948238444

  ebook forthcoming

  The Lowlife

  Introduction by Iain Sinclair

  Harryboy Boas is a gambling man – the dogs. He lives in the quietly respectable streets of Hackney, keeping himself to himself. A new family moves into his building, with unsettling consequences. Harryboy is drawn into an underworld where violence and revenge stalk those who can't come up with the money.

  Black Spring

  paperback: 9780948238451

  ebook forthcoming

  Rosie Hogarth

  by Alexander Baron

  ebook published by New London Editions in 2013

  ISBN: 978-1-907869-85-3

  New London Editions is an imprint

  of Five Leaves Publications,

  PO Box 8786, Nottingham NG1 9AW

  www.fiveleaves.co.uk

  First published in 1951 by Jonathan Cape

  Published in 2010 in paperback by New London Editions

  Rosie Hogarth © Alexander Baron, 1951

  and the Estate of Alexander Baron, 2010

  Introduction © Andrew Whitehead, 2010

  Cover image by Darius Hinks

  Five Leaves acknowledges financial support from Arts Council England