London Belongs to Me

by Norman Collins

  Then the solution, the perfect solution that she should have thought of straightaway, came to her. She would keep it intact, not touching a penny of it until the war was over and then give it to Ted to buy a business. And what was more she would write and tell him so. It would give him something to look forward to during all the time he was away. Only one thing left her unhappy about that – Cynthia. It was monstrous, positively monstrous, that simply because Uncle Henry, despite his odd ideas, had been a hard‐working, painstaking sort of chap, a silly, giggling, little ex‐usherette should reap the reward of it.

  She was still thinking about Cynthia when she reached Dulcimer Street. And her thoughts were so unsatisfactory that she couldn’t bring herself to talk about them. In consequence when Mr Josser got back that evening from his rent collecting – and he was looking whiter and wispier and more frayed than ever – she didn’t tell him a thing about it. She merely got him his supper and sat watching him while he ate it without so much as a hint. She was, if anything, rather quieter than usual, and Mr Josser asked her if she was tired.

  She had no answer ready and so she ignored the question. She merely told him to hurry up with his meal so that he could get to bed early. It was a funny business becoming an heiress at sixty‐four. Funny, and unnerving.

  2

  Isn’t there any news of Percy? Has he faded right out of it now that the prison doors have closed on him? Doesn’t he exist any more?

  Oh yes, Percy still exists. You can see him if you want to. Only you wouldn’t recognise him. Not at first glance, that is.

  He’s the one standing at the end of the room. It is a long room with bars at the windows. He is standing to attention with his heels together. But the clothes that he is wearing are so shapeless that he might as well be standing easy. Only his shoulders, where the jacket is a bit on the tight side, show that he has drawn himself up for the occasion.

  In front of him is a short grey‐haired man, a kind of foreman. He is dressed in a double‐breasted blue uniform with black buttons rather like a park‐keeper’s. Percy is in grey. Grey with clumsy black arrowheads stamped on to it.

  Come round to the other side so that you can see his face. It’s Percy all right. But you’d never have guessed it from the rear view. That’s because all his yellow hair has been sheared off. The wavy and shining halo that he used to go about with has gone completely. And in consequence his head looks much smaller. In fact, it looks definitely a small head. Perhaps it is. And the moustache that he was just getting started has gone, too. It is just a very ordinary, rather weak, sort of face that is left.

  ‘Ever made a pair of shoes before?’ the foreman park‐keeper asks suddenly. He has to shout because there is so much noise going on right down the length of the bay.

  Percy shakes his head.

  ‘No.’ And after a pause. ‘Sir.’

  ‘Feel you can learn?’

  Percy grins. It is the same old grin. Or very nearly. Perhaps it is a bit feebler about the corners.

  ‘I’m a trained mechanic, I am.’

  The grey‐haired man looks up sharply.

  ‘Not here, you’re not,’ he says. ‘You’re a beginner, same as all of them are when they start. And if you don’t make the grade you go back to manual work with the rest. See?’

  The grin has vanished by now. Percy is looking for an opportunity of saying ‘Sir’ again. He’s become very respectful since he came here. It’s the only thing they understand.

  ‘You’ll start on soles, you will,’ the grey‐haired man goes on. ‘You’ll keep on that until you know it. And if you don’t seem to be learning you’ll go back like I said.’

  ‘I see, sir.’

  ‘And no talking. There’s enough noise without talking. If you want anything step back from the machine one pace and I’ll attend to you when I come round. No. 9’s your machine. There’s someone on it now. You can stand by and watch. Don’t get in his way. And don’t talk.’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘That’s all. Get going.’

  Percy stands watching. It’s easy. He can see that at once. Just kid’s play. Like fretwork. There’s a revolving knife, a moving band of metal, at one end of the bench. And, when the leather goes up against it, the knife cuts through like a bacon‐slicer. All that the man in charge has to do is to twist the leather round a bit so that the shape comes. But that’s easy too. It’s all marked out in blue pencil. You couldn’t go wrong. The only thing is the speed. The man at the machine works as though he had become a part of it. The rough soles keep piling up in a wooden box at his side where he flicks them with one hand while the other hand is getting the next piece of leather ready. He is a drawn, elderly man, a pretty ancient sort of workman, though in that awful uniform he might really be any age. Silently, without even looking up to see who is watching him, he goes on turning the leather and flicking the finished soles to one side.

  ‘Wonder he doesn’t go barmy,’ Percy thinks. ‘Doing that all day. Wonder he doesn’t go barmy.’

  Then the foreman comes round.

  ‘Seen enough? Think you could do it?’ he asks, speaking close up to Percy’s ear because of the din.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ says Percy.

  ‘I shall be watching,’ says the foreman. ‘Don’t you forget that. I’ve got eyes in the back of my head, I have. And on both sides as well. Stand back, No. 4382.’

  The elderly workman steps back, still without looking up.

  ‘Hold the leather in your right hand and steady it with your left,’ the foreman says. ‘And mind your fingers: they’re the only ones you’ve got. Don’t hurry. Take your time and be careful. Remember: you’re learning something.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  The foreman and the elderly workman move off. Percy is left alone with the machine. The fact that it is a machine is something. It belongs to his order of things. Only of course it’s primitive. Crude and primitive. Percy can think of a couple of improvements straightaway by just looking at it. But perhaps he’d better leave improvements till later. He’s got to get on with things as they are now. Very gingerly he puts the piece of leather up against the spinning knife and the blade cuts quickly deep into the blue pencil line.

  ‘I said “careful,”’ a voice at his elbow reminds him. Percy looks round.

  ‘One of them bearings is loose, sir,’ he says. ‘I could fix it for you.’ But the foreman is not pleased by the suggestion.

  ‘If I want anything fixed, I send for a real mechanic,’ he says. ‘And if I want to know what needs fixing, I ask. If I don’t, it’s all right as it is. You’re learning, not teaching. See?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Percy answers, twisting round the piece of leather so that the snick in it shan’t show any more. ‘I see, sir.’

  Chapter LXXV

  1

  Mr Puddy had got a germ. Or something. It couldn’t, this time, have been anything that he’d eaten because, ever since the last bout, he’d been very careful about his food. He’d been avoiding all made‐up dishes. But the result was just the same. Whatever he ate, Mr Puddy suffered stabbing pains, fits of giddiness and a sense of profound dejection.

  This had been going on for nearly a week now and he was growing morbid. He even began to fear that he might be losing weight – always a dangerous thing in a man. And his mind recoiled. It was a horrible thought dying of starvation in the midst of a world of plenty. He got so worried at last that he spent a penny at a weighing machine. The long red hand on the dial finally came to rest at 13 stone 5 lbs. But, as he couldn’t remember what it should have been, this didn’t really console him. And still the pains, the giddiness and the dejection continued.

  He had tried all the patent medicines, of course. But they weren’t of any use to him. By now he was taking two or three different kinds of tablets and a tablespoonful of this and that, and six drops in water of the other every two or three hours. And he might just as well have saved himself the trouble. It looked, indeed, as though after a lifetime of serious
eating he was simply going to waste away and lose himself.

  So, in the end, he went along to see a doctor. It was a terrifying experience. Terrifying, because his own father – a profound, hearty eater like himself – had been carried off at about the same age by apparently the same mysterious ailment. He had dwindled away to less than ten stone before expiring. And as Mr Puddy sat in the stuffy little waiting‐room he heard in his ear ancestral voices prophesying… prophesying what his father had died from.

  The doctor went over Mr Puddy slowly and carefully. There were wide pale expanses of abdomen to be thumped and prodded, and he prodded hardest where the pains hurt most. When he had finished he stepped back and Mr Puddy gripped the hard sides of the surgical couch while he was waiting for the verdict. But all that the doctor said was that Mr Puddy needed exercise. And he said it in such a callous and unfeeling kind of voice that, instead of feeling relieved, Mr Puddy was offended. He got up with as much dignity as a man can muster when his braces are down below his knees, and addressed the doctor.

  ‘The deed for egcercise is wud thig,’ he said coldly, ‘and these sybtobs are adother. I shan’t waste any bore tibe here. I’ll go roud to the Gederal Free. Good evedig.’

  And with that he went, his pouchy heroic head carried high, and his body rumbling and protesting as he moved.

  It was the five o’clock surgery that he had attended; and even now it was not yet five‐thirty. From the moment he had stripped down to the moment he had buttoned up again, it had not taken ten minutes in all. And the fee, because Mr Puddy wasn’t on the panel, was five shillings. Sixpence a minute, he told himself morosely, was what the doctor’s impertinence had cost him.

  After the gloom of the dingy little surgery, the brightness of the early May evening dazzled him. He stood on the pavement outside, blinking at the sky through half‐closed eyes, like a large grounded bat. The real trouble was that he didn’t know what to do with himself. There was no point in arriving at the warehouse until seven. There was no point in climbing up all the stairs at No. 10 only to come down again. And he didn’t feel strong enough to go along to the Hospital to be thumped and prodded again this evening.

  After a bit, he began to move off. Not to anywhere in particular – because he hadn’t got anywhere in particular to move off to – but simply because he couldn’t stand there any longer. And, as a doomed man, he walked slowly: he mooched. His own coroner, he passed along the street, his eyes fixed on the pavement ahead of him.

  The real trouble was that something told him that his number was up. Or, if not actually up, at least due to go up shortly. The way things were, even if the doctor happened to be right about Mr Puddy’s stomach, it only meant that he was being preserved from one kind of dreadful death for another that was just as dreadful. Indeed, what was the matter with Mr Puddy was probably this haunting presentiment of disaster.

  Through brooding over it for so long he knew just how it would happen. It was round two in the morning when it was going to occur. The Germans at last would have turned their furious eyes on London, and the bombs would fairly be raining down by then. He would be at the warehouse at the time, of course. Sitting in the middle of the tinder‐pile, so to speak. There would be explosions all round him as though the earth were giving way. And fires, huge unquenchable fires. And choking, asphyxiating smoke. And the lights would go out. And he would be left somewhere in the centre of the furnace with the last precious drops of water dripping from the nozzle of his stirrup‐pump, and the bucket empty… Even though it was a warm night, Mr Puddy’s teeth were chattering at the thought of it. He had only to close his eyes, and he could see the actual bomb – a big fat one shaped like a porpoise – with his name written in white letters right round the side of it.

  ‘High exblosive,’ he said aloud. ‘High exblosive and incediaries.’ And he shuddered.

  It was a fine pearly evening, and the high upper stories of the buildings were glowing back at the retreating sun. Even the buses as they darted out from the shadows of the buildings shone with more than their own natural scarlet. A barrage balloon resting idly on its cable was pure gold.

  But Mr Puddy was oblivious to it all; it might as well have been foggy. With his hands clasped despondently behind his back so that the attaché case containing his dinner bumped against his knees with every step he took, he mooched on. He had come quite a long way by now and already the fresh air had done him good. He was breathing more deeply and the spots before his eyes seemed fewer. His thoughts, too, took on a gayer tinge. After a while he began recalling better times, old meals that he had eaten, the kind of stuff that even now he had got stowed away in readiness for his recovery. In the midst of dissolution, his spirits returned to him and he remembered what a lot of firemen there were in London nowadays. Trained men – quite young men, some of them – whose whole job it was to mop up incendiaries as fast as the Germans cared to send them down. There was even an emergency water‐tank, like an elevated duck‐pond, just opposite the main entrance to the warehouse.

  ‘So log as I’b dear a telephode, I’b all right,’ Mr Puddy told himself. ‘It’s only if i’b cud off, I’b for it.’

  He had unclasped his hands by now and was walking upright. Really walking this time, not just mooching. And suddenly an idiotic and astonishing thought came to him. He decided that he would walk all the way to the warehouse. His self‐respect depended on it. It would prove that he wasn’t the sort of man who needed any surgery doctor to tell him when to take exercise. And as he stepped out he seemed to be entering his prime again. The wraiths and spectres had been left behind in Kennington.

  All the same, it was a long walk. A very long walk. Nearly four miles, in fact. And for the last half mile, Mr Puddy proceeded more slowly. Much more slowly. Finally, he stopped entirely. Stopped and raised first one foot off the ground to ease it, and then the other. Each time that he lifted his foot and the remaining one had to take all his weight, he winced. The walk had been just that much too long.

  Mr Puddy’s arches had fallen.

  2

  Back in Dulcimer Street, Mr Squales was in a bad way, too. The worst possible, in fact. And that was because he was cornered. Positively cornered. There was, he realised gloomily, no other word for it. No other word. And no way out. It was appalling.

  What was so awful was that it was all Mrs Vizzard’s doing. With that nagging and inhuman persistence which is one of the most irritating things about women – especially loving ones – she had been quietly and secretly plotting behind his back, apparently for weeks. It was for his sake, his good, that she had done it – he knew all about that. And, even if he hadn’t known it, she had told him so to his face. The fact remained, however, that he didn’t thank her for it. Not deep in his heart he didn’t. At the time there had been nothing for it, of course, but to smile back and say thank you. He had even added that he was quite bowled over by the news. As, indeed, he was. And to prove his gratitude he had gone so far as to kiss her hand. But this was a mistake. Because, after all the trouble that she had been to on his account, she was holding up her face for a proper sort of kiss.

  The cause of his depression was that she had found a job for him. And the absurd part of it was that the job suited him perfectly. If he had found it for himself before he had given his heart away to Mrs Vizzard he would simply have wolfed it up. Not that the salary was anything. That was only four pounds a week – the sort of wage that good typists get. It was the sundries, the asides, the perquisites, that made the job worth considering.

  The post was that of organizing secretary to the North Kensington Spiritualist Union. It was a new body, the Union, and its headquarters were in Portobello Road.17 The premises had been an undertaker’s before the Spiritualists had taken them over, so the clientèle hadn’t changed so very much. The place was completely re‐decorated, of course, and Mr Squales rather liked the chaste, fumed oak with which the interior was now furnished. There was a large circular table with copies of Light and The Spir
it World and Beyond and The Great Divide spread out on it. And there was a sectional book‐case containing the classics of the cult – lives of famous mediums, records of scientifically controlled psychic experiments, and books on fairies. He’d seen them all when Mrs Vizzard took him over.

  Not that there was any money for the Union in this side of it. The books were there more for their educational value than for anything else. The North Kensington Spiritualist Union, in fact, was really a kind of information bureau. And, as such, it kept open for deucedly long hours. From nine‐thirty in the morning until seven o’clock at night it was there to solve every kind of supernatural problem that might have presented itself suddenly to the residents of Notting Hill. The times of its own séances and those of affiliated bodies – the Tulse Hill Psychical Research Society, the Ponder’s End Spiritual Temple, the Golders Green Group and so forth – were displayed in frames around the wall. It was, as a matter of fact, because of one frame containing the names of mediums prepared to undertake private séances that Mr Squales finally accepted the post. As he stood there he saw his own name invisibly over‐printed across the lot of them.

  But 9.30 to 7! He shuddered. To arrive at Portobello Road by 9.30 would mean leaving Dulcimer Street at about quarter to nine. And leaving Dulcimer Street at a quarter to nine would mean getting up at eight. Even, possibly, at five to. It would be bad enough even now with the summer coming on. In winter, in the black‐out, it would be unthinkable. He might as well be a milkman or a postman.

  But that was not the worst of it. There was an additional peril attached to the job – one that he couldn’t very well talk about. At least not to Mrs Vizzard. And that was that there was now nothing, absolutely nothing, to hold up the wedding by even another day. Previously, it had been simple. He had told Mrs Vizzard outright that he wouldn’t marry her until he was self‐supporting. Now, thanks to her, he was going to be. The job was open from next Monday. And if he took it, he would be entirely vulnerable. To‐day was Thursday. Only three clear days. That was what made him so jittery.