Opposite the Cross Keys

by S. T. Haymon

  Which brought her back to my scabs, that perfect alibi for non-attendance at school. She asked wistfully, ‘Are you dead sure you aren’t still catching?’

  ‘Dead sure,’ I confirmed. ‘But –’ a glow spreading through me as the idea took hold – ‘I tell you what –’

  My chest, invisible to the outside world, was still spattered with several scabs not yet ready to drop off. In their state of near-ripeness, I was pretty sure, it shouldn’t be too difficult to prise them from their moorings. And I had brought my glue with me to St Awdry’s in case the ones on my face fell off betimes.

  ‘Would you do that?’ Nellie Smith cried, when I had unfolded my plan. ‘Would you reely do that for me?’

  ‘Yes.’ I could hardly speak, so choked was I with the happiness of cementing – or rather, gluing – my friendship with this marvellous girl. ‘It’s nothing, really.’

  By the time the working day was over, the sun still scorching the sky, we were, all of us, grey all over, our throats so coated we could only croak. The bottle of cold tea, the juicy onion rings, had become a tantalizing memory.

  I don’t know how much they paid Mrs Fenner for her nine hours of unremitting labour, but she seemed satisfied. The gypsies, to the manifest pleasure of the foreman and his assistants, picked up their skirts then and there, and stowed their pay away in their drawers or their petticoats. I was given fourpence and a pat on the head for my pains, which seemed to me such monstrous injustice that I burst out without thinking, ‘Is that all?’

  Whilst the other workers stared in admiration, I was given an extra tuppence and a chuck under the chin – I have said I was a fetching child. When, on the way back down the loke, I asked Nellie Smith how much she’d got, she opened a tightly closed fist and disclosed three sixpences.

  ‘One they gi’ me. Two I took.’

  ‘You didn’t!’

  ‘Knocked over one of them little piles on the table accidental, an’ then helped stack ’ em up again, like the little lady I am. I’d ’a got more if it hadn’t bin for that fucking foreman watching me like a cat watching a mousehole.’

  ‘I wish I’d thought of that.’

  Nellie Smith paused in mid-stride and looked me over reflectively. ‘Nah,’ she pronounced at last. ‘You don’t reely. You ain’t the type. Give the game away just looking at you.’ She asked conversationally, ‘Your ma or pa ever swipe anything?’

  ‘I – I shouldn’t think so.’

  ‘There you are then!’ Nellie Smith spoke with a touch of patronage; even of pity. ‘You can’t go agin nature. It’s got to be in the blood. Someone like you might as well give up afore you start.’

  We arranged to meet, after tea, behind the ruined pigsties which were a little along the road from the gypsy encampment. Nellie dismissed my invitation to come to Opposite the Cross Keys as if I were a bloody fool to suggest such a thing. I soon learned that the gypsy girl had an instinctive distrust of any house which was not on wheels; and wondered how she would make out on that Yorkshire farm where the Romany princess awaited the coming of her daughter.

  I suggested, carefully casual – I’d have given anything to see the inside of a real gypsy caravan, ‘I don’t mind coming over to your place, if you’d rather.’

  ‘Don’t talk daft!’ was her answer which, perhaps because I was tired (for I had, of course, known all along what her reply would be), had me sulking all the long walk back from Stratton Strawless, through Salham Norgate and beyond.

  As we neared the encampment a red sports car nosed out of the entrance. A large man with a black felt hat pushed back on his bushy red hair, his collarless shirt unbuttoned and stomach hanging over a wide leather belt worn well down on the hips, stood on the steps of what turned out to be Nellie Smith’s caravan. Otherwise there was only an old woman about, sitting on a stool outside a caravan which was painted a dark green and looked like an outsize barrel. Further back, some naked children played with a piece of wood, and a woman bent over something that steamed in a big black pot hung on a tripod over hot ashes.

  Before Miss Lee drove her car over the grass verge, she twisted round in the driving seat, looked back at the red-haired man and waved. The man raised a lazy hand in acknowledgement, and in another second the car was out on the road back to Norwich, disappearing pertly round the next bend.

  As it vanished from sight my pent-up spleen exploded.

  ‘You let her into the camp!’ Then I looked at Nellie Smith’s face and was sorry I had spoken.

  ‘That bleeding Chink!’

  I was really too tired to go out again after tea, but I had promised. Mrs Fenner and Ellie sat outside on the pavement, enjoying the cool of the day. For once, Mrs Fenner had borrowed Ellie’s comb and was using it to get the chicken bits out of her own hair. I had never seen her hair down before; not so long as Ellie’s, and touched with grey, but soft and springy in texture, the way hair ought to be, not like Ellie’s dank spaghetti. For the first time I realized that Mrs Fenner wasn’t old at all, younger than her daughters in her warmth and vitality.

  I said that it had been a lovely day.

  ‘Lovely!’ She stopped combing and burst out laughing. ‘Some people have a funny idea of lovely! I reckon your ma’d have the Prevention of Cruelty on to me if she knew where I had you today. An’ as fer Maud –’

  ‘I won’t tell, I promise.’

  ‘I know that.’ She spoke without laughter now; with a purity of trust that made the evening sparkle like a crystal, every outline precise and perfect. ‘Otherwise I wouldn’t ’ve done it.’ Looking at me critically: ‘You could do with a bit of a comb yourself.’

  I backed away from the fearsome object which could only, I felt sure, make my hair filthier than it was already. I could feel the jar of glue which I had concealed in my knickers oozing some of its contents on to my thigh through the slit in its rubber cap.

  ‘I shan’t be long.’

  ‘Off to play wi’ that little gypsy gal? She’s all there, that one. But you mind out. Keep yer eyes peeled. You know what gypsies do wi’ little children. Kidnap ’em – take ’ em away an’ nobody ever hears of them again.’ The familiar laugh broke out again, rocked the chair on the uneven ground. ‘Good riddance to bad rubbish, eh? No such luck!’

  ‘No such luck,’ I assented, smiling.

  Nellie Smith was waiting for me. She was sitting on an upturned pig trough moodily munching on a stalk which she spat out when she saw me coming.

  ‘You took your time.’

  ‘I had to have my tea first.’

  ‘Oh ah? What did you have?’ She might have been a zoologist inquiring into the eating habits of some strange animal.

  ‘Sardines.’ Going over to the offensive myself: ‘What about you?’

  ‘Stew. Hedgehog an’ squirrel.’

  ‘You didn’t!’

  ‘Want me to go an’ fetch you some?’

  ‘No thank you.’ We stared at each other in hopeless silence. We might have been Jew and Gentile, divided by the unbridgeable chasm of kashrut. Then, with a sudden change to a quicksilver charm which was irresistible, Nellie Smith demanded, ‘Did you bring what you said you would?’ and when I fished the leaking glue out of my knicker leg, she exclaimed, eyes dancing, ‘You’re a ruddy angel!’

  I had to take my dress off to get at the scabs which were left on my chest. As I stood there in my vest and knickers, by the decaying sties filled with nettles, I felt very peculiar, almost religious. The sun was going down, orange and slow. The place still smelled of pig manure, but old and dry, not unpleasant: spicy, like incense.

  The scabs were not as ripe for picking as I had thought. They clung to my skin like shipwrecked mariners to a floating spar. Each left behind a red oval which I had been warned, I don’t know how many times, by both my mother and Maud, meant a scar, a lessening of my beauty for which I would grieve all my days. (They spoke truly, except for the grieving bit. The scars are still there.)

  I offered up my scabs willingly, glad to hav
e them in my gift. I stuck them on to Nellie Smith’s face with dabs of glue, a mystic union of her flesh and mine. I placed two in the centre of her forehead, one either side of her nose, one in the middle of her little pointed chin. I only had an odd number left, so one cheek had to have four scabs and the other three, which perhaps was as well: too great a symmetry might have aroused suspicions.

  When I had done, Nellie Smith looked wonderful. No truant officer would have let so much as her shadow fall across the school door.

  She danced about in excitement.

  ‘How do I look? Han’t you got a bloody mirror?’

  I hadn’t, and she was so eager to see what she looked like that she hardly stopped to say ta before running off home to her caravan to look in the glass. Left alone, I scrambled back into my dress, thrust the jar of glue back into my knickers, and went back to the road. The sun was behind the trees, but the sky was still bright – richly purple below, with, higher up, fluffy white clouds gilded at the edges, looking as if they too had been stuck on with glue, only by a more practised hand.

  I got home so dazed with tiredness I couldn’t stand straight, and Mrs Fenner made up my bed on the sofa even though Mr Fenner was still eating his tea, reading his Old Moore’s Almanac between mouthfuls. I washed neither my dirty hair nor my dirty body. My chest felt sore, a soreness I treasured, though I was too tired to remember why. I think, that night, the rats in the derelict cottage next door must have gone to bed early too. At any rate, I never heard a peep out of them.

  loke: Norfolk for lane or narrow alley

  Back to Text

  Chapter Nine

  It was during my convalescence at Opposite the Cross Keys that the matter of the AA sign came to a head. In those days and, so far as I can remember, right up to the outbreak of World War II, when they were taken down for security reasons or else requisitioned for scrap, every village in Britain, by courtesy of the Automobile Association, sported, on a conveniently sited building, an outsize metal medallion, black-printed on a background of mustard, giving the name of the village and the names and distances of the next populated places along the road in either direction.

  The occupiers of the premises on which these useful objects were displayed received the princely sum of five shillings per annum for allowing them to be so used; and Mrs Fenner was one of the AA’s beneficiaries in this respect. The five shillings was her private income, notionally spent and re-spent a dozen times before the actual postal order arrived in the post. It gave her status as a woman of independent means. As to the sign itself, it was nailed to the front wall a little above the living-room window, so much part of the facade that nobody (the notional passing motorist apart) ever gave it a thought.

  Until, that is, the day it was taken down and put up on the Leaches’ cottage instead.

  The reason for this unheralded sideways movement was that, a little before, Mr Leach had left his former occupation, whatever that might have been, to become an AA scout, one of those stalwarts who patrolled the highways and byways of the UK on motor-cycle combinations raising their gauntleted hands in salute to any driver whose vehicle sported the gleaming AA insignia on its radiator.

  Apart from this modern equivalent of forelock-pulling, they also rendered assistance in cases of puncture or minor mechanical breakdown, though – or so one got the impression – not enough to risk dirtying their natty uniforms of mustard and black, which none of the Association’s members, even in extremis, would have wanted, for the sight of one of those godlike creatures touching his cap was enough to make a driver’s day. If, on the other hand, you preferred blue-grey to mustard and black (as my mother did) you joined the Royal Automobile Club instead: but as to the sheer panache of their individual salutes, there was nothing to choose between them.

  When the news of Mr Leach’s new job filtered through to the neighbours, the Fenners fell about laughing, because there was nothing either stalwart or godlike about Mr Leach. But it was amazing: buttoned tightly into his mustard jacket, the two rows of buttons slanting down from broad-seeming shoulders to slim-seeming waist, his breeches tailored to a T and his black-peaked cap on his head, he looked transformed, whilst his salute alone was worth the annual subscription.

  As if they weren’t uppish enough already, the Leaches in their new role became insufferable. Mrs Leach stopped going about with her hair in curling pins, and went into Norwich once a week to have it marcelled. She let it be known that they were thinking of taking their annual holiday in Dunkirk sur mer, which was a place in France, very French.

  Having got the AA to shift the sign to their wall, they went to the police – specifically to PC Utting, who lived in the Salham St Awdry police house – when, or so they alleged, Charlie Fenner shinned up a ladder one night when they’d gone into Norwich to the pictures, and painted it black all over.

  PC Utting didn’t think much of the AA scouts, whom he saw as encroachers on his own bailiwick. He didn’t think much of the Fenners either, but at least they didn’t act as if they were a superior order of police. Before the Fenner-Leach feud blew up, separating the village into two opposing camps, most people in St Awdry’s would have been surprised to learn that there ever was an AA sign on Opposite the Cross Keys; but once their attention was directed to the circular discoloration left by its abduction they instantly remembered that of course there was.

  Most of them became angry with the Leaches, not so much because they were for the Fenners, who, to be truthful, were not all that popular in the village – though poor they weren’t meek, as God had intended the poor to be – as because, on principle, they did not care to have things altered, even things which they hadn’t noticed in the first place. PC Utting, having pondered the facts submitted to him by the Leaches, gave it as his considered opinion, off the record, that the obliteration of the sign was most probably the work of RAC saboteurs, though he doubted if it could be proved.

  The AA sent down a new sign.

  Mrs Fenner was so upset about the loss of her private income that, without telling her, I wrote to the AA, to their regional headquarters in Norwich.

  Dear Sir, I wrote.

  I am writing on beharf of Mrs Fenner who has ruhmitisem and cant write herself at the moment. (It was an unwritten convention at Opposite the Cross Keys that Mrs Fenner could read and write as well as anybody, if only she hadn’t just broken her glasses, come down with writer’s cramp, or was seeing spots in front of her eyes any time those skills were called for.) I am writing to say it isnt fare to take her sing away just because Mr Leech has gon to work for you. Mrs Fenner has had it for donkies years and needs the 5/ - a lot mor than Mr Leech does. My father has a car, a Moris Oxford, only he belongs to the RAC because my mother doesnt like the culler of the AA, but if youll put the sing back on Mrs fenners I am pretty sure they will joyn the AA if I ask, because they do most things I ask them to do.

  Hopeing you are well,

  Yours sinserely,

  Mrs Fenner (on beharf of)

  After I had written the letter and posted it, I asked Miss Lethaby to get St Giles reverse charges because I wanted my father to start in right away getting my mother used to the idea of being saluted by men in mustard and black instead of blue-grey. When I explained my reasons, my father, to my surprise, sounded serious. He said that what I proposed doing was attempted bribery which was a criminal offence, and I wasn’t on any account to send the letter. I didn’t let on that I had already sent it.

  As the post van hadn’t yet called, I asked Miss Lethaby to unlock the box and let me get the letter out, but she went livid and told me that tampering with His Majesty’s Mails was something I could go to prison for; to say nothing of where would she be, for aiding and abetting. So I went back to Opposite the Cross Keys and wrote another letter to the Sir at the AA, cancelling the earlier letter because I didn’t want to go to prizon either for bryberry or tampring with the males, but I still didn’t think it was fare and when I grew up and had a car of my own I would never joyn the
AA, never, not if they beged me on bended knee.

  Within days a letter came back, addressed to Mrs Fenner (on beharf of), and enclosing a postal order for one pound which they hoped would prove acceptable as some recompense for the loss of the AA sign. They hoped the postal order would not be construed as an attempt to bribe me to join the AA instead of the RAC when I had a car of my own. There was no such intention and they hoped I was well, yours faithfully.

  After that, things in Salham St Awdry cooled down, though we no longer spoke to the Leaches and, whenever we went down the garden and saw Mr Leach’s feet and ankles showing below his lav door wearing the mustard colour socks which were part of his uniform, Mrs Fenner would make some loud remark about what the colour put her in mind of.

  It wasn’t until ten days later, when a car stopped alongside one morning as I was out on the pavement, that I realized the Affaire AA had not quite run out of steam.

  ‘I’m looking for Salham St Awdry,’ the driver explained; and when I answered, naturally enough, that that was where he was, he looked at me as if I were the original village idiot. Pointing to the sign on the Leaches’ wall, he demanded, ‘What’s that, then?’

  For the first time in days, I looked up at the sign which said, as plain as black on mustard, Salham Norgate.

  The man took some convincing that, appearances notwithstanding, Salham St Awdry was where I said it was. Once I’d got rid of him I walked the mile or so up the road to Salham Norgate to see if their sign – fixed to a house whose front parlour was the village grocery shop – had got it right.

  I took a look at the sign, and then went inside, where the woman who ran the shop, a comfortable, grey-haired body, greeted me with the smile due to an important customer for sherbet suckers.