by Derek Beaven
Now the smile seemed to have grown tighter and thinner. Jack had the idea that Tony Rice no longer operated in quite so cavalier a manner, believed a mite less securely that the war’s crippling yellow breath could never bloody touch him. A vague knowledge fluttered at Jack like some insect against a pane of glass, that Tony was finding his presence too troubling to cope with.
Now, in the mild April evenings, there was one further question. The mother of a little girl along the road came complaining about him. Something had been done, or said. The matter was confused; some scenes of Jack’s life were broken and mixed up. The girl had told her mother. His own mother had been in a rage. And she was frightened. He’d been punished and sent to his room where he’d recited the Lord’s Prayer over and over again, to make the thoughts leave his head. He’d tried pulling the dressing-gown cord tight around his neck.
No more had been said, but the incident gave Jack the impression that the moody discipline which bound his family so tightly and insulated it so effectively, no longer had quite the force to contain him.
Then his mother let it drop that it wasn’t some common-or-garden government scheme that he would be sent to, but actually a school – a boarding school. He was being offered an opportunity, a chance to get education. It would make a man of him, and nothing was wrong nor ever had been.
A certain Tuesday, when he got in from the bus, there were cardboard cartons and boxes, wrapped and tied, that had just been delivered. Stacked one on top of the other in the hall they looked exactly like American PX supplies. He stopped in his tracks, horrified to see London matters blatantly on display at his home. His mother came from the front room with the baby on her hip. She beckoned to him. ‘Aren’t you going to open them, then?’ She laid Melia in her pram.
He did as he was told. He started to fumble the knot out of a string, expecting any moment that he and his mother would be joined by Frankie, or Mrs Lavender, the woman with pencilled eyebrows. Mrs Lavender’s ragged laughter would herald some terrible consequence. His fingers began to shake. He listened for the tramping of soldiers’ boots on the concrete path outside. Break your mother’s heart to know the half of what you get up to, Figgsy had said. I’d have to rip yours out, wouldn’t I, you shitty little tramp.
But the cardboard contained not candy, nor Camel cigarettes, nor watches, nylons, revolvers, nor the packets with the curious names – Benzedrine, Penicillin, Morphine, Cocaine – nor any other blazon of an underworld where walls had ears and careless talk would cost you dearly. He took out instead a perfect school cap, ring striped in silver and blue and stuffed with tissue paper. Where the tissue fell away, a badge fell with it, waiting to be sewn in. The sweat cooled on his brow, and the faint subsided. His mother smiled.
She pulled out the rest of the contents and held up the blazer. It was made from the same colours and had the same badge. There were silver buttons. ‘Try it, Jack. Why don’t you. It’s for you.’
He put it on. She put the hat on his head. ‘There. My! Aren’t you the smart one? Come on, let’s look at you.’ She took him up to her bedroom. He saw himself in her dressing-table mirror, the top half of a strange new creature in the stiff, slightly-too-big clothes. Standing behind him, touching him, she was holding the badge over the peak of his cap. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘What do we think of that?’ The clutter of her brushes, lotions and lipsticks appeared twice in front of him, and again in the side mirrors. The flavours of her perfumes drifted. He looked around, feeling the pressure of her body against his new collar. One of her lace-edged slips was thrown over the back of the chair; a pair of nylons lay strewn on the floor.
‘Don’t you just look the part? Little Lord Fauntleroy!’ Excited, she took him downstairs again, her arm about his shoulder. In one package there were towels and sheets, pyjamas, a new dressing-gown. In another a pair of cricket boots, white plimsolls, black shoes. Yet another held the stack of grey shirts, the grey corduroy trousers, the thick grey socks.
She was in a kind of transport, unpacking the lavish, best-quality items, as if there were no rationing nor had ever been, nothing make do nor threadbare in the world. A typed list had the items ticked off. ‘They call the socks stockings, Jack. What do you think of that? You won’t want to speak to the likes of us any more, once you go to a toff school. Not with your Latin and French. It’ll be Physics next, I’ll be bound.’ Then she mimicked a high-faluting tone. ‘Every Sunday the boys attend matins at the cathedral. Won’t want to know your own mother, will you?’
Jack couldn’t think how to answer.
Her voice changed. ‘But then you never wanted me anyway, did you? Couldn’t wait to get out of the door, half the time. You hate me, don’t you? Well, you’ll be pleased now. You’ve got out of here, eh? Joining the posh side of the family.’ She laughed mockingly. ‘You’ll be better off without me, won’t you, holding you back?’
She began to stuff the clothes back anyhow inside their wrappings. ‘That’s what you think, don’t you? Like your dear Auntie Clarice.’ A roll of name-tapes fell on to the floorboards and came slightly undone: J Warren, J Warren, J Warren. Then she turned her back on both him and the task and went fiercely upstairs in her high-heeled shoes. He watched the seams of her nylons running up under the hem of her fine American skirt, her shapely calves moving under the pressed fabric with that tantalising near-nakedness.
Halfway up, she turned, her hand on the banister. ‘The bloody ground she treads on. Still worship it, don’t you? You don’t give a tinker’s for me. Nothing I’ve done for you has ever been good enough. That’s what you think, isn’t it? And now all this.’ She gestured about inclusively. ‘The things I’ve had to do. You take it all in your stride, don’t you? Oh, yes. You’re just a dirty-minded, ungrateful little boy. If I had my way, I’d take the bloody hide off you. Just you think yourself lucky, that’s all.’ She faced about again and continued angrily up the stairs.
Across the road from the front gate, there was a high, untidy hedge, and beyond it a field where the drills of new corn bristled, so that the sunlit clay had a shimmer of green running all the way down its slope. At the corner of the field a beech tree rose up tall. He climbed into the crook of a branch, and looked out towards London from under a fringe of young, almost transparent leaves. Two fighter planes were circling over Hornchurch. Beyond the golf course, he could see glinting railway lines, and the red caterpillar of the tube train crawling under the sun towards Dagenham.
She was jealous of him. He ought to have been punished. Instead, a parcel had arrived, and it was for him. Then surely his Aunt Clarice had been as good as her word. He remembered her soft fair hair pinned up, and the sound of her voice. She’d tried to persuade his mother to let him come to her. Instead, they’d settled on this boarding-school education. He recalled the faint perfume of flowers that came from her clothes, the sweet sound of her voice. She was almost present.
A POOL OF sick had formed outside the station canteen. The doorway to the bar looked in on to a dark wood counter cluttered with half-filled bottles and soda syphons. The man inside stroked his white moustaches. Jack’s mother wiped the splashes off his shoes with her handkerchief. It was a Saturday afternoon. The hot sun had filled the air with so much moisture and pollen that it tasted sweet, peppery, near liquid. The clouds hinted at thunder. He had heard nothing from Clarice.
Jack watched the shop fronts, with their poor displays and empty shelves, flick across the taxi window like the scenes in a film. People were going about their business. There was a market square. The car edged its way between shouts and jostle. Then came the sharp smell of cattle. Jack saw them being driven, lowing, into iron pens by men in brown coats. The driver swung to avoid a greengrocer’s horse and cart with ‘Finest in Chelmsford’ painted upon it. There were more shops, canopied windows in three-storey brick house fronts.
The next moment they were among side roads, and after that in broader streets flanked by villas. He shifted himself on the leather seat, and his new trousers
squeaked. The taxi-driver’s cigarette smoke drifted back in thick strands; he put up his hand to touch one of them.
His father began speaking to the driver about the taxi’s year and model. Then he made a joke about the nabob in the back seat. They’d all better mind their manners, he said. From now on, they’d have to do their business without leaving a smell. Jack looked to see what the nabob was. All at once unlikely hedges had closed in on both sides. It was a narrow lane with a pair of old-fashioned country cottages at the bottom. A gateway had a gravel drive under tall, gloomy trees which, for a second, quite blotted out the sky. Then ahead, so that the branches framed its grey facade, there was an imposing villa of the type they’d passed only a few minutes earlier. On the tight little gravel drive two or three large cars waited before them at the entrance, a central portico with stone pillars. One of the cars was painted khaki with a regimental badge on it.
Jack squinted through the plate glass from under his peaked cap. The smell of sick still hung about, because his mother had the handkerchief in her handbag. Now he fingered the embroidered blazer badge. The jacket seemed made of bright blue cardboard, and his bare knees stuck out in front of him as though from some corduroy furnishing. If he bent forward and looked down, his black toecaps shone back at him. His shoes pinched his feet, laced too tightly over the thick, ribbed stockings.
The taxi came to a stop. The driver got out, opened the doors and fetched the case from the boot. Jack walked forward on the gravel and mounted the steps. He shook the hand of a tall, grey-haired lady with a lined face and plucked eyebrows. Her skin was dry and curiously cold. She cast an eye over his parents and then took him in. Almost, he had no conception of being inside his body.
Now he stood beside an iron-framed bed and three boys were gathered round him. One of them was studying his wrist. The boy asked him if his American watch were his own, and then told Jack to take it off.
‘Why?’
‘Because you’re going to get bashed up.’ The boy who spoke thumped the bed with his fist. Jack should say goodbye to his mother now, another said, in case she didn’t recognise him after what he was going to get.
A white-coated young woman, like a nurse, appeared at the door of the dormitory. ‘All right, Warren. Your parents are just off now. You can pop down to see them go. Just leave your things on your bed, for a minute.’ She disappeared back beyond the open door.
‘Well,’ the first boy said. ‘What are you waiting for? Hadn’t you better go and do what Matron said? Just mind you don’t sneak, that’s all. Know what sneaks get? I tell you: sneak, and it’ll be all the worse for you. Understand?’
Warren went to the door and stepped out into a narrow, polished corridor. It was quite dark and only comfortably wide enough for one person. Seven years old, he clomped firmly down upon the boards in his new shoes, not sneaking, and descended the great, carpeted stairway, to where his parents were standing in the front hall, next to the grey-haired lady. His mother was toying with one of the buttons on her fur coat. His father, in his cravat and dog-tooth suit, holding his trilby hat in his hand, was making a joke about not forgetting Jack’s holdall. He called it a johnny bag, and sneered.
The lady turned apologetically to another couple by the door. She was sure parents would understand the difficulties for schools in maintaining a full complement of boys during the present unfortunate circumstances. She coughed and hurried on. And also of masters. Geography was with the Marines; while Scripture – the young Revd McGilligan, who’d been showing such promise, had been sent as a padre to Iceland of all places. And her own son was in training somewhere in Southern England, which was all a mother was permitted to know. Then she looked round again. ‘Ah, yes. Young Warren. Well, Mr and Mrs Rice. You can rest assured he’s in safe hands.’
Jack shook hands with them; and then his family was gone.
THE PARQUET FLOOR smelt of polish and sour milk and the inside of shoes. The hallway was lined with name boards and mounted shields. Boys spilt from behind solid oak doors, talking breezily and laughing. Jack blinked hard and swallowed. The boys swirled away in a crowd and disappeared.
An older lad, dressed in a pullover and long trousers, was left reading a notice. The grey-haired lady asked him to take Warren back up. ‘He’s in Plantagenet, I think. Aren’t you, Warren? There was talk of putting some of them in Hanover, but I don’t think we had enough beds in there. Matron will know.’
As he climbed the thick staircarpet, in his thick corduroy, Jack remembered the word, hangover, his mother smiling: When you drink too much. Like Dad.
‘New, are you?’ said the boy.
‘Yes.’ Jack’s holdall with his towel and pyjamas and washing kit grazed against his leg.
‘It’s not too bad here. Once you get used to it.’
On the great galleried landing boys milled in through the open doorways, and rows of beds with cabin trunks beside them were briefly visible in the light from huge distant windows. He passed a washroom on his right with two enormous enamel baths and a row of sinks and was delivered back to his bed.
‘Well,’ said the boy who’d threatened him. ‘Did you sneak? I bet you did, didn’t you? I bet he sneaked.’ He looked round at the others.
‘I didn’t,’ Jack said. ‘I didn’t sneak at all.’
‘You better not have. What’s your name?’
‘Warren.’
‘I’m Temple. What form are you in?’
Jack stared at him. He could make no sense of the question. He wondered whether he was allowed to defend himself.
‘Bet he’s in Gordon,’ said one of the others. ‘Bet he doesn’t know anything.’
‘Bet he’s an evacuee.’
‘Bet he’s a Jew.’
‘Come on, where do you live?’
‘Bet he’s an oick. Talks a bit like one.’
‘What outfit’s your father in?’
A tall boy of about twelve strolled towards a bed in the corner by the fireplace, and threw himself languidly upon it. ‘So this is the billet I’ve drawn this term. God, what a hole. Temple, you can unpack my trunk. Neatly, mind. The rest of you can get your own things sorted out. And no noise.’ He pulled a magazine from his blazer pocket. ‘I’ve got an Illustrated London News I want to read, to see how my brother’s getting on. He’s kicking Fritz out of Africa, for your information. Anyone who disturbs me gets the regulation three.’
How extraordinary a world he’d been transported to. Jack thought of The Tinder-box, and of the voice that used to read it to him. When you drink too much. Like Dad. And how he’d liked that story, especially the part where the soldier came with his money to live in the town, and was a gentleman. Now that his parents had gone, he could even imagine that Clarice would come in to explain, that she would walk in like the princess, wearing her pretty green jacket and mauve serge skirt to tell him that the war was over.
Much later that evening he was standing in the washroom, not sneaking, holding his new towel, wearing his new pyjamas, new slippers, and new, regulation dressing-gown, while his fellows were at the sinks, washing and larking about in the mysterious twilight. In the huge sash windows the last of the daylight made silhouettes of the trees. There was a cry from outside.
At once the boys left what they were doing and the windows were run up. Half-naked bodies craned out into the darkness. Two boys broke away suddenly, their faces intent, excited, as they ran past Warren out of the room. A prefect appeared, grey-corduroyed. ‘It’s a bug called Wiseman. They caught him beside the spinney. His face was all bloody, but he escaped.’
‘He’s a plucky little fighter, actually, but he’s taken an awful pounding.’
‘He tripped over a root by the lawn and smashed his mouth, before they could do it for him.’
Warren stared at the high washroom walls. They stretched up and beyond, steam-grey and scarred with pipework. From a long wire in the ceiling, a single unlit light bulb dangled over the rows of outdated wash-basins.
‘What sor
t of name is that? Wise man? Not so sensible now, is he?’
‘He’s a Jew boy. Or a spy. He’s a German. They come over here and change their names.’
‘Refujew!’
The windows were slung up like guillotines, and his fellows were leaning out.
‘There he goes! They’re all after him again.’
He heard the din of running feet. He kept wiping his mouth.
‘He’s down. They’ve got him. He’s done for.’ At last another prefect came in, with long trousers and a badge. ‘It’s all over. Now, any other new bugs, get along to your beds. It’ll be your turn tomorrow.’
But tomorrow his Aunt Clarice would be coming for him, and there would be another man with her, the man from the garden.
IT WAS SUNDAY already. They were at the top of a high street, passing along beside the larger shops and the coaching inns with their heraldic signs and arched gateways, their quaint latticed windows without shatter tape. The sun sparkled off the grit on the road. Rutherford’s hand in his was firm and civil. Every so often the other boy broke off his grip to scratch his ear. ‘Damned itch. Can you see anything in there?’
Warren looked. ‘No.’
‘Tell you what. I’ll ask Matron to have a look at it when we get back.’
‘I should,’ said Warren. He would have laughed, but he was worried about what might happen next. Still Clarice had not got word to him.
