by Tobias Hill
‘You won’t be touching my plumbing,’ Hullo Evans calls, to desultory hoots and applause, and he winks at Dora, who stands beside him with Solly’s hand gripped tightly in hers. Through his grasp she can feel her husband’s trembling, nervous ire. ‘What are you calling a slum?’ someone else shouts out – and there is a wider murmur, the first stirrings of a defense of the place they call their own; but the council man won’t be brooked.
‘The structures that surround us now put us all in danger. The war did them grave damage – you may not see it, sir, but I assure you it is there, in the retaining walls and in the foundations. Who will be responsible, if some part of your home falls and does a person harm tomorrow? Will you? No, you will not, because the council is your landlord. We take on ourselves that responsibility, and as responsible owners we have made the surveys that prove what we’ve all known for years – that these antique buildings are no longer fit for purpose. Our purpose, therefore, is to see them cleared and replaced with safe and proper dwellings.’
‘Where are we to go, then?’ someone asks. It’s John Remnant, Dora sees, the spindlemaker who has lived and worked in the Buildings longer than anyone remaining. John’s voice is mild with some faded country burr, but others take up his question; younger, more forceful tongues. The council man waits them out, leaning to chat with his colleagues, straightening, raising a hand.
‘Some of you, I’m sure, will want to return here – to new homes – when the estate is finished. You will be happy to hear that those who wish to put their names down on the housing list today, may do so. You will not be given special treatment, but you will be getting in “early doors”, as it were. I would urge you all to apply, the housing situation being what it is. In the interim, provision may be made for the elderly and for families with children who find themselves with no recourse elsewhere. The county council is able to relocate those in most need to prefabricated housing in East Ham, Catford and Epsom. Yes, Miss, Epsom is quite far. I would ask you all to remember that this is all in the short term. Our view is the longer one, and I am sure that you, too, once you have considered the issues fully, will come to see things the same way. It is your children you should think of. Well then. Are there any questions? No questions? Mr Laing, here beside me, will be taking names . . .’
‘Catford!’ Jack Harrow spits. ‘I wouldn’t walk my shittest dog down there. I’m down the Birdcage, who’s with me? Solly, you’ll have one.’
‘Oh,’ Solly says, cleaning his spectacles, peering around as the crowd trails off, ‘no, you wouldn’t want me, Jack. The taste in my mouth, you’ll end up carrying me back. I’ll save us both the trouble, head straight home with Dora, if you don’t mind.’
‘Right you are,’ Jack says. ‘Enjoy it while you can, won’t you?’ And off he heads towards the arch, his hounds skittering around him.
Half the night Solly paces, his footsteps starting up and stopping, kitchen to lounge to kitchen, like a timepiece he has taken apart and can’t see how to mend.
Dora, nightgowned, in the doorway. ‘Come to bed now,’ she whispers, and Solly stops in the dark and lifts his head.
‘I’m thinking,’ he says. ‘Can’t you see?’
‘What do you need to think about now? Think tomorrow.’
He isn’t having it. ‘Those jumped-up boys,’ he spits, ‘they should kit them out in jackboots.’
‘They’re doing what they think is best.’
‘For who? For us? Not likely. Putzes, they think we are, the way they look down at us –’
‘Solly,’ she says, ‘don’t talk like that.’
‘They don’t do this for us. For their long views, is why they do it. If we wanted five-year plans we could clear off to Moscow. We were happy here.’
‘Not always,’ Dora murmurs, and he huffs, puffs himself up.
‘Who is happy always? We never asked for different. Do they ever ask us what we want? Someone should teach them manners. I wish . . .’
‘What?’
‘I wish Jack had set his dogs on them,’ Solly says, but he is abashed, he can’t bring himself to mean it, and Dora laughs.
‘Come to bed,’ she says again, and he does, then, but he isn’t finished: in his sleep he goes on tossing and turning.
What I wish, Dora thinks, is that Bernie were still here. Bernie would have known what to say to council men and their long views. She’d have stood up for all of them. But Bernie Malcolm is nine years dead, and Clarence and his children long gone out of Dora’s life. Dora wishes them well wherever they are, though Bernie is the one she misses.
Henry? Solly mutters, once. Other things too, mumbled pleadings and entreaties. The name aside it is all incomprehensible, but Dora needs no gloss to understand. That they have nowhere to go is only the sharp end of it. The keener edge is Henry, five years gone. What will Henry do, when he comes home and finds no home, finds them vanished and the Buildings with them? He’ll turn his back. He’ll walk away just as he did that bright morning, when he kissed them goodbye and never returned.
One day he will. Of course he’ll come, when he’s ready, when he’s done whatever it was he had to do, out in the world. Because what kind of life would it be, if they never saw him again?
Fred and Sarah Isaacs nab a place down on Grey Eagle Street. ‘No point waiting for council favours,’ says Fred. ‘It’s basement, but there’s two rooms, see? And it wouldn’t hurt us to share the rent. There’s a courtyard, Solly – you could park your barrow. Don’t get your hopes up too much, we’re not talking Claridge’s, and Sarah says to say we’ll want the space back when the baby comes. Fancy a look?’
Two rooms is mostly all it is. There’s a tiny pantry by the yard door, and a queer dead corner to the hall with a kitchen grate and an oven, a lampblacked, hunchbacked beast that looks as old as the house itself. In the room which would be theirs a window gives a chink of light and a mole’s-eye view of ankles passing. There is a privy in the yard and a toilet upstairs with the Irish, and the first floor is Irish, too: on the second lives Mr Barnard, rent collector for a dozen Spitalfields lodgings.
‘Well?’ Solly asks, ‘what do you reckon?’
They’re talking at the mole’s-eye window, shoulder to shoulder, hush-hush: Sarah is perched on the stairs, taking the weight off her feet, while Fred scurries around, fag in hand like a dowser’s wand, searching out draughts and mouseholes.
‘We might not find better.’
‘Or worse. Fred wasn’t joking about Claridge’s. What’s that pong?’
‘Cabbage?’
‘If you say so.’
‘We can keep looking once we’re in. I can do it while you’re working. And this isn’t far.’
‘No,’ says Solly, perking up. ‘We could nip back sometimes, see how they’re getting on up there, could we?’
‘Of course, dear,’ she says.
‘Right,’ he says, giving himself a shake. ‘Better get our skates on, then. Better get packing.’
They’re in before March is out. Barnard likes the easy life and is affable enough when he comes below stairs each week, marvelling at Sarah’s bloom and girth, not saying no to tea as he counts their rent. The Irish, though, don’t want them there and make no bones about it, hats on tight and fists in pockets when it comes to introductions, dour on the landings, brooding in the courtyard over the affront of Solly’s barrow.
‘This is a Christian house!’ Mrs Powers throws open her window to yell, one night as he gets in, and Solly goggles up at her, dead on his feet and at a loss for the words that all come later, in the mole’s-eye room with Dora: what’s unchristian – if that’s your poison – about a man with a barrowload of watches?
At County Hall she waits in line, for a ticket, for a form, for her turn with the pens chained by their blotting pads and inkwells. ‘I’ve been here hours,’ a woman hisses to Dora, as they scratch away, ‘Have you? Some people seem to go straight through. I’d take the war over this. At least when you were queueing then it felt lik
e you were all in it together.’
‘Cheer up, love,’ the man behind them says, making them both jump, ‘it’ll all be over by Christmas,’ and the woman blows on her form, ever so cool, and says she won’t be holding her breath if it’s all the same to him.
The waiting room is high and wide as the house on Grey Eagle Street. Dora still has on her winter coat, but it’s cold all the same, the seats by the radiators being all taken or reserved with hats or caps or warning glances. Now and then a bored factotum comes and calls a ticket number. In the corner furthest from his door a family have brought out a thermos and are eating saveloys with their fingers off a sheet of newspaper.
At last she is seen into an office where a fair-haired man sits writing. ‘Make yourself at home,’ he calls, head down, and Dora takes the chair that has been set out in front of him.
He is scribbling on her form. She wants to crane and look, but hates that he might see her do it. Instead she tries to still herself: hands not to wring themselves, teeth not to knead her lips. The man’s writing is busy as ants. On his little finger he wears a ring. The left hand is all he has: down the other side his jacket sleeve is pinned, angled towards the pocket.
‘Sorry if you’ve been kept waiting,’ he says, sitting back abruptly. ‘It’s a jungle out there these days, we hack away for all we’re worth but we never see the end of it. Miss Lazarus, I presume?’
‘Mrs,’ she whispers, and the man peers back at the form.
‘So you are. Well, you wear it well, I’m sure you won’t mind me saying. The moniker, I mean.’
His eyes are pale and kind. ‘Are you the officer I should speak to about council accommodation?’ she asks, and he smiles.
‘Well, yes. One of them, at any rate,’ he says, and taps the form with his pen. ‘Your English is impressive. May I ask if you studied, in Germany?’
‘I am not German. I have been here for twenty years,’ she says, tilting her chin. ‘I am a British citizen.’
‘So I see,’ the man says, ‘an English hausfrau in need of a homestead.’
‘Yes,’ Dora says. ‘We would be so glad of somewhere. Please.’
Scritchscritch, goes the man’s pen. His forehead is creased. He is frowning even as he smiles. There is an edge to his voice, a forced civility that Dora does not quite hear or comprehend.
‘You understand, I’m sure, that we can’t provide for everyone. We build what we can, but I’m afraid that often we are forced to disappoint. It’s the war, you see, it does have a habit of raising people’s expectations beyond what is strictly practical. To the Pyrrhic victors, the spoiled ambitions. Unless you are in acute need, the list for council housing . . .’
‘We must be patient,’ Dora says. ‘I understand.’
‘Patience is a virtue,’ the man says, ‘but we don’t provision on grounds of saintliness. You have somewhere now? Rented quarters, it says here.’
‘In Spitalfields. Until September only.’
‘Is it very far from your husband’s work?’
‘No.’
‘Do you find it unaffordable?’
‘No, it is not expensive for us.’
Scritchscritch, he goes again. Through the window Dora can hear gulls, severe and free, as they scour the river.
‘Clean?’ the man asks. ‘Do you find yourself capable of keeping your quarters sanitary?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘You are neither of you infirm? No. Do you have dependents, Mrs Lazarus?’
‘I don’t –’
‘Children, perhaps.’
‘No.’
‘No children,’ the man murmurs. ‘Pity.’
Dora thinks of eyes. Eyes can lie, of course. People can lie with their looks, if they are those kinds of people.
‘We were in the Buildings,’ she says, more urgently, and the man glances up.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘The Buildings in Columbia Road. You are knocking them down.’
‘Oh, goodness,’ the man says, ‘the market buildings. How on earth did you end up in those old piles?’
‘We can put down our names, for the new estate. We were told so. You said we would be early doors.’
‘Not personally, I shouldn’t think. Early doors indeed. If only my colleagues spoke English as well as you do, Mrs Lazarus! We’d all be on a clearer footing, then. Of course you can put down your names for the Columbia Road development, but nothing is assured. In the meantime –’
‘We have only five months,’ she says. ‘Where we live now.’
‘So you’ve said. You don’t strike me as incapable of finding somewhere under your own steam, however, nor can I honestly describe you as in grave need. Do you have enough space? For the moment, I mean?’
‘No,’ she says, but his kindly gaze is on her.
‘How many rooms?’
‘One.’
‘One room to yourselves?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you are married, and childless.’
‘Yes,’ she says, and bites her lip at last as the man’s left hand reaches out, the little gold-ringed finger raised to tap-tap-tap at Dora’s script.
Saturdays, they walk up to Columbia Road. They do some shopping, show their faces, then go and see the Buildings. Some weeks it feels like sightseeing, others like calling on a friend who has been unwell for years and is coming to the end. The hoardings go up promptly, but there’s no hastiness to the business that goes on behind them: nothing is torn down for months. It’s as if the council have decided to save themselves the effort and let nature do its work.
Nature does well enough. Emptied of people, the Buildings suffer. At first it’s just the shabbiness of everyday abandonment, but soon the decay gathers pace. One day they come and every window visible is smashed, as if a small army has gone round with hammers and a vengeance. Another morning – a gusty one – the hoardings have blown down all along the eastern side, and by the time Solly and Dora arrive others have already picked their ways in, to look at what was theirs, to gawp, perhaps to steal. They find the entranceways fumy with cats and vanished men, the chapel spire leaning, the brickwork everywhere extruding greasy growths of moss and mould. Great slubs of concrete have hardened on the flagstones of the square, where the counterweights of the wrecking cranes lie waiting, the Buildings housing their own incipient destruction.
Mr Barnard broaches his tea. ‘Ah,’ he says, ‘that does it. It never tastes the same upstairs. I’d blame the pipes if I wasn’t such a bodger when it comes to cooking. That’s what you get, you see, with a public school education.’
Mr Barnard spent his childhood at a boarding school in Wiltshire. It made him what he is. So he tells his tenants, and he wears the tie each day to prove it.
‘Won’t you have something to eat?’ Sarah asks, half-rising, but Barnard waves her down.
‘You sit down, Mrs Isaacs, look after yourself.’
‘I’ll go,’ Dora says, ‘cake?’, and Barnard beams and says he doesn’t mind if he does.
She heads to the pantry, cuts and butters slices. In the Isaacses’ room she can hear Sarah and the rent collector making the best of things. Barnard isn’t troublesome, but there’s no parlour for him, he likes to sit and chat, and so it is a bedroom or nothing. The Isaacses have good furniture – better than Dora’s – but still: it is too intimate, to have a stranger sitting in there. Probably, she thinks, he sees worse in other places. There was a week when he came early, and after awhile Dora found herself smelling the warm straw musk of piss, and saw the Isaacses’ chamberpot, unemptied under the bed.
When she gets back Barnard has their rent out. ‘And you, Mrs Lazarus?’ he asks, ‘how are things in the hours and minutes business?’
‘Dora has been looking for somewhere else to live,’ says Sarah. She is not unkind, Sarah, but she can seem hard, the way she ploughs straight to the point. ‘Because, the baby.’
‘Um,’ Barnard says, frowning through the cake. ‘I’ll be sorry to see you
go. I hope you and Fred stay on, Mrs Isaacs. The only thing worse than losing good tenants is watching the dodgers move in. Any luck, Mrs Lazarus?’
‘The council,’ she says, and tries to shrug away the scorn that creeps into her voice, ‘they are no use. I saw a man. He wasn’t kind. He said they have nowhere for us, not now, maybe never,’ she says, and Mr Barnard clears his throat in a fierce kind of way.
‘Now look here,’ he says, putting the rent down, taking up his accounts book and pencil. ‘I’ve nothing against good government, except I’ve never seen it yet. You go to the LCC, you’re talking to the wrong people. Just because they tell you they don’t have a shoebox between them, that doesn’t make it true. They’re mealy-mouthed up there, it’s all queues with them, and the thing about a queue, Mrs Lazarus, is that someone’s always on the VIP list. This is my head office, there are some gents there you should talk to. I’ll tell them you’re coming, put in a word on high for you. We’ll see if we can’t do you better than the jobsworth socialists, shall we?’ Barnard asks, and tears off the foot of a page with a flourish that brings it to her hands.
S.N.L. Holdings, Barnard has written, and under the name an address out on the Holloway Road. Dora takes the Underground, emerging cautiously, stopping where the crowd deposits her, like an unseasoned traveller setting foot on foreign soil. She is light with hunger, though too ill at ease to stop and do anything about it. The shops – grimy, gaudy, windblown – don’t look much different from those at home, but she barely knows North London, doesn’t know which way to turn so that, if her gaze could travel as the crow flies, home would lie before her.
