Opposite the Cross Keys

by S. T. Haymon

  When I opened my eyes I saw, half-hidden behind the big conch shell, two of the little bags filled with the trinkets I used to sit playing with at May Bowden’s dining table. One of the bags had a piece of card pinned to it. On it, in handwriting all thicks and thins, were the words, For Miss Impertinence, with Love.

  I loosened the drawstring of one of the bags and tipped its contents out on to the cobbles, recognizing as old friends the paste shoe buckles, the pen holder with the Eiffel Tower inside, the beads, the buttons, the hat-pins.

  I piled everything back into the bag again, picked up its fellow unopened, and dropped the two into the lily pond. The slime between the lily pads parted to let them through, and soon closed over again. I climbed back over the gate and went home.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  In winter it became very cold in Chicken’s cottage. The flue had collapsed, the hearth was unusable. Chicken kept a little paraffin stove going, one that gave out more smell than heat, moving it about so that he could direct its warmth on to his hands wherever he happened to be working. Maud had knitted him some mittens, but still his fingers were raw with chilblains. Sometimes, when I sat in the room silently watching, I stopped watching because I couldn’t stand the sight of those hands any longer.

  The boat grew. Growing, it seemed to consume its builder’s energies, even the man himself. He seemed smaller, though that may only have been his shoulders, hunched with fatigue. He could still move in that saucy, challenging way of his, like a ballet dancer, but only after one of his rare days off, before the cold and the heaviness of the work stiffened his bones again.

  The boat grew a hull and a deck and the beginnings of a cabin. There were disappointments. At some point I became aware that not only was there no engine, but no provision for one. No mast, nor sails either. Instead of being the galleon in which the two of us were to be free to roam the seven seas, the boat, it seemed, was a mere floating bungalow, such as were to be seen moored one behind the other, as it might be a suburban street, along half the rivers of Norfolk. Eyesores, my father called them, as near to anger as I ever heard him.

  Not surprisingly, Chicken looked at houseboats in a different light.

  ‘You ever slep’ in a bed tha’s like a cradle, Sylvie?’ he demanded one morning when I had brought him in a steaming mug of Oxo. ‘To an’ fro, to an’ fro, the water movin’ past, always on the go. You ever woke up to the reeds whispering along the bank when there in’t a breath of air stirring, yet still they’re whisperin’ secrets like they was plotting to blow up the Houses of Parliament?’ Chicken set the mug down on his workbench. ‘What you see,’ he asked, ‘back there in Norwich, when you get up of a mornin’ an’ take a look out o’ the window?’

  ‘Well …’ I thought. ‘The houses opposite, and the street, and the trams going past –’

  ‘Houses an’ street an’ trams going past – bloody shit! Wouldn’t you rather sit up in yer bunk – yer don’t even have to set foot on the floor – an’ see a cow an’ enough space to make you dizzy?’

  Privately, I enjoyed looking at the houses opposite my bedroom window – knew their individual bricks like old friends – and I loved the trams that came clanking up the hill like happy dragons. Given the choice of a cow or a tram to look at, I’d have chosen the tram any day.

  Chicken finished his Oxo, and handed back the empty mug.

  ‘Ta,’ he said. ‘You’re a good gal, Sylvie. Better ’n some I known.’ As I reddened with pleasure, he added, ‘Glad you come by. There was one little thing I bin meaning to ask you.’ He fished in his pocket and brought out a nail about three inches long, with a big head and a blunt end, which he handed to me. ‘You up in the city. Think you could pick me up a bag of those, off the nail stall?’

  The nail stall, in the Rag and Bone Market next to St Peter Mancroft, at the top end of the Market Place proper, wasn’t a stall at all, properly speaking. It consisted of a long trestle table set out with hundreds of little canvas bags, all containing nails. An overflow was piled up higgle-piggledy underneath the trestle, on the ground. Norwich people said there wasn’t a nail made anywhere in the world you couldn’t get at the nail stall, and the fact that some of the little canvas bags were printed in Chinese or other foreign characters seemed to bear out the claim. Every bag had a sample nail sewn on to the outside. That was all the help you got from the stallholder, a cadaverous Indian man who professed to speak no English and who my brother Alfred said he knew for a fact slept on a bed of nails when he went to bed every night: it was how he had got into the business in the first place. The man wore a red turban that was always half undone, with long black hair spilling out, and he had bloodshot eyes, possibly due to insomnia.

  ‘Hatch nails,’ Chicken said. ‘Don’t ferget the name. An’ use your eyes, gal. See the galvanizing’s thick an’ bright – I don’t want no rubbish, mind. Sixteen penny’s the right one, but if he haven’t got ’em, I’ll make do wi’ twelveses.’

  Until he explained that ‘penny’ in relation to nails was an expression of length, I thought that the sixteen and the twelve pennies were Chicken’s quaint way of acquainting me with the cost.

  I asked, beginning to feel bad, ‘How much will they be?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Chicken sounded annoyed. ‘You’ll see the price on the bag, dummy. Half a crown to three bob, I reckon. That heathen’s got ’em all marked up, won’t take a penny less.’

  Beginning to feel very bad, I stumbled into my apology.

  ‘I’m sorry, Chicken, I’ve bought all my Christmas presents. I’m sorry, but I’ve only got threepence left. There’ll be my pocket money next Saturday, but that’s only sixpence. If I don’t spend anything all week, that’s still only ninepence.’ I stood with my head drooping, puffing out my cold white breath. I felt terrible.

  Chicken came close and looked at me. His eyes were dangerous. He put out a hand to touch the side of the boat, stroked a timber of the hull.

  ‘Tell me, gal,’ he said. ‘You ever thought what I’m goin’ to name this here contraption?’

  I shook my head dumbly. I had never thought about it. To me it was the boat. Enough. To question further was to seek to know the secret name of God.

  ‘Well, I’ll tell you, so long as you don’t tell nobody else. They say as it’s bad luck to let on beforehand. On’y when every last thing’s bin done, then an’ not before, tha’s when you paint a boat’s name on the bow, for all to see. But seein’ as it’s you – well, then –’ a pause for a notional roll of drums – ‘I’m goin’ to call this here boat the Lady Sylvie. What you say to that?’

  I had nothing to say to it. I burst into tears. Tears of joy, gratitude, love. And a dreadful fear at the pit of my stomach that I was being bribed to steal.

  The nail stall, that Saturday, was doing tremendous business. The Indian was kept on the hop, taking money, making change, listening to requirements and producing the exact nail for the job. If he really couldn’t speak English he seemed to have no difficulty understanding it. His bloodshot eyes were everywhere.

  As the only female in the vicinity of the stall I felt sufficiently conspicuous already, without taking into consideration my only too questionable behaviour. There was, after all, a limit to the number of times you could circle a pile of nails full of a wide-eyed childish curiosity without giving rise to suspicions. I had pinpointed Chicken’s sixteen-pennies almost at once – a cluster of fat little bags leaning against a foot of the trestle. The price of each was marked in black ink, the figures formed in a foreign way, but readable. Only too readable.

  3/3.

  I had wandered away from Maud and her mother with an air of innocence calculated to put Maud on her guard if she hadn’t been taken up with Christmas shopping. As I circled the nail stall yet again I kept a weather eye out for them. Something – you never could tell – might bring them up to the Rag and Bone at the very instant I was stretching out my hand to filch one of those little bags marked 3/3.

  ‘And wha
t d’you think you’re doing?’ In my imagination I could hear Maud’s voice echoing round the Market Place, ringing bells in the police station. It was no good. Nellie Smith was right. I wasn’t the type. I couldn’t do it.

  Bitterly ashamed at having let Chicken down, at proving unworthy of his trust, I left the clatter and chatter all about me and went home. I took a knife out of the cutlery drawer in the sideboard and ran upstairs to my bedroom. As I passed the drawing-room door my mother called out, ‘Is that you, dear?’ I said it was and continued on my way.

  My goal was the money box which stood on my mantelshelf. It was made of red-painted metal, in the shape of a pillar box. You posted money through the slot where, in a real, lifesize pillar box, you would have posted letters. This money box, I can honestly state, was the only festering sore in a family life which was otherwise harmonious to a degree.

  The only way to retrieve money posted through the slot was via a tiny door in the base, opened by a key which my parents kept in a place known only to themselves and God. What went into the box was what I, in my rebellious way, categorized as no-money: small round objects that superficially looked like coin of the realm – shillings, florins, half-crowns, silver of consequence, no sixpences or threepenny bits – but were in fact without reality. Through the year we were seldom without visitors at St Giles, uncles, cousins, aunts, who hardly ever took their leave without pressing money into my hand.

  The catch was that no sooner was the guest off the premises than I was escorted solemnly to my bedroom mantelshelf, there to pass through that rapacious slot every penny I had received as a parting tip. Clink! it rang in farewell at the beginning of the year, hitting the metal bottom; the sound dulling as the months passed and the money box slowly filled until, by December, it was an over-fed clunk! On the first day of the new year the money box key appeared as from nowhere, the door in the bottom ceremoniously unlocked, the receptacle turned upside down on the dining-room table, and its contents counted.

  The sum was astronomical! But did I ever see a penny of it? I did not. A nasty little book with National Savings on the outside was produced from the desk drawer, and book, Maud and I despatched to the General Post Office – the local sub-branch being deemed inadequate to the occasion – there to hand the money over the counter in exchange for nothing more than an inked entry and a smudged rubber stamp.

  ‘For your future,’ my mother always explained. ‘When you’re grown up you’ll be glad you didn’t fritter it away on rubbish.’

  Since I had never had any intention of frittering it away on rubbish, I remained persistently sceptical of this far-off consummation, so misty down the corridors of time. And, I may say, I was proved right. By the time I came into my little hoard it meant nothing much. It made no difference to my life one way or another. Whereas, when I was young enough to enjoy it, what gratification might I not have had from such necessities as comics, ice-cream boats and gob stoppers?

  And nails for Chicken.

  I took the money box from the mantelshelf, sat down with it on my bed, and inserted the knife blade in the slot. I knew I would have no luck with the two-shilling pieces and the half-crowns – they were too thick – but I had once almost got it to disgorge a shilling simply by shaking, so you never knew. Twenty minutes later, the money box looking only too clearly as if somebody had been at it with felonious intent, I threw down knife and box alike, buried my head in the pillow, and gave way to despair.

  ‘And what do you think you’re doing?’ said a voice at my door, the very words I had imagined her saying in the Rag and Bone Market. Maud came into the room, shut the door, took in the knife and the money box at a glance, and inquired calmly, ‘What you need so bad, then, you got to go an’ commit burglary to get it?’

  If it seemed a little injust to be accused of burglarizing one’s own property, I was in no state to dispute the point. I grabbed at Maud’s hand, and sobbed out the sorry story of Chicken’s nails.

  ‘You’re cracked,’ she said, when I finished. ‘Whyn’t you tell me afore I went out wi’ ma? I could ’ve run to it then. Now I haven’t got two sixpences to rub together till next Friday.’

  ‘He asked me,’ I answered, doleful but proud to have been singled out.

  ‘An’ where did he expec’ you to get three an’ thruppence from? Don’t answer!’ she added quickly, as I opened my mouth to tell her what I felt sure Chicken had had in mind. ‘Let me have a think.’ She frowned, reviewing the position. Clearly, equally with myself, there was one option she had discarded at the outset, that of saying no. If Chicken wanted his nails, he had to have them.

  ‘Can’t have that boat of his sinking to the bottom for want of a bag o’ nails, can we? Gimme that knife.’

  When she had had no better luck than I at coaxing even one shilling through the slot, let alone three, she gave the brisk little nod which I knew meant that she had made up her mind what to do. She took the box over to the hearth, where poker and shovel, brush and tongs shone brightly Brasso-ed, never used except on the rare occasions when I was ill and had to stay in bed, when the sheer gloriousness of a fire in one’s bedroom made one wish never to get quite well again. She knelt down and, after a brief contemplation of the possibilities, selected the poker: up-ended the money box and, with one unhesitant movement of the wrist, smashed in the little door in the base.

  Returning with the box to the bed, having first meticulously rehung the poker on the little stand which housed the fire implements, she tipped the money out on to the quilt, selected a shilling and a two-shilling piece, and returned the rest to their desecrated cubbyhole.

  ‘You got the thruppence?’ And when I nodded, speechless in the face of her magnificent audacity, ‘Tha’s all right, then.’ She put the money box back on the mantelshelf, lying it on its side, so the money wouldn’t fall out. ‘I always told your ma, keeping it there, one day somebody’s bound to catch their sleeve on it, knock it off the shelf afore they could stop it, an’ down it’d come like Humpty Dumpty.’

  ‘Oh no!’ I cried, transported by love. ‘I can’t let you take the blame! I’ll tell her it was me.’

  ‘You’ll do nothing of the kind!’ Maud retorted sourly. ‘I didn’t bring you up to be a little liar!’

  I couldn’t decide whether to lie to Chicken or not. I wanted him to think me a brave girl, bold enough to have stolen a whole barrelful of nails if he had requisitioned them, not just a measly little canvas bag. I wanted him to know how the Indian had grabbed at me, only I had slipped from his grasp, eluding both him and the Market policemen, who, truncheons drawn, had pursued me the length and breadth of the Market Place, blowing on their whistles, like cops in a Mack Sennett movie. Oh, I had the choice of a dozen scenarios which I had lain in bed that night happily devising and revising.

  In the event, to my disappointment, the subject never even came up. I cycled to Salham St Awdry on Sunday morning, and called in at Chicken’s cottage before I even let the Fenners know I was there. Early as it was, Chicken was already busy, shaving a piece of wood, the delicate slivers curling off the spokeshave on to the floor. Absorbed in what he was doing, he took the bag of nails with a casual ‘Ta’ and without even checking that they were the right kind. He chucked the bag on to the workbench.

  Deflated, I turned to go.

  ‘Hang on!’ Chicken said. He put down wood and spokeshave and came over to me, fiddling in the pocket of his black waistcoat as he came. ‘You forgot somethin’.’ He took my hand, cupped it into one of his and, with the other, poured into it a rain of sixpences, seven of them in all. ‘Have to pay me sodding debts, don’t I, or you’ll have me up in court. Count ’ em if you don’t believe me,’ he went on as I stood dumbly, looking down at the little pile. ‘Don’ bother with the change. The thruppence extra’s for yer trouble.’

  ‘Oh, Chicken –’ I stammered.

  ‘Wha’s the matter wi’ you, gal? Think I expected you to pick ’em up fer nothing?’

  Chapter Twenty-four

&nb
sp; That Christmas, I didn’t see a lot of Salham St Awdry. St Giles was awash with visitors and I had my social duties to perform. Maud went off home on Christmas Eve, not to return until the evening of Boxing Day, during which period Mrs Hewitt, putting aside her washboard and dolly blue, functioned as a well-meaning but far from adequate substitute. I think the gift which gave Maud most pleasure at the festive season was to come back to St Giles after the junketings were over to find what a mess the house had got into, without her.

  School broke up a week before Christmas, so that I was able to spend a couple of days going plucking with Mrs Fenner. Awful as the plucking sheds were in summer, it was as nothing to the hell of winter: draughts like icicles down your back; your feet, no matter how many pairs of stockings you crammed into your shoes, stuck to the frozen concrete as if by magnets. And the feathers! It was unbelievable, the number of feathers the well-dressed goose or turkey wore as a matter of course, each one stuck in place with a glue which could have made their fortunes if they had had the nous to market it.

  Cold in the sub-zero temperature, hot with aggravation, we pluckers displayed little of the Christmas spirit as we wrestled with those bloody feathers and held our own against the foreman who came round threatening to dock us if we didn’t make a better job of getting them out. Actually, we knew he didn’t dare, because for once we had the upper hand, the demand for pluckers at that time of year far exceeding the supply. All the gypsy women were up in Norwich selling sprigs of holly and mistletoe, as well as hideous furry toys that bounced up and down on an elastic string and were guaranteed to send an infant hysterical.

  The four and sixpence I got for my two days’ work I laid out on a Christmas cake which I had heard Mrs Fenner admiring in the village shop window. It looked a picture, covered with white icing, with a fancy frill round it, and a snowman on top. Unfortunately, when Mrs Fenner came to cut it, at teatime on Christmas Day, she couldn’t. It was so hard that even Tom, who was the strongest of the family, couldn’t make a dent in it. Village shops didn’t turn over their stock all that fast, and it must have been a cake left over from the year before, if not the year before that.