Sons and Daughters

by Mary Jane Staples

  ‘How’d you come by all that modesty?’ asked Paul.

  ‘Modesty?’ Miss Saunders looked sorry for him. ‘Can’t afford modesty. That’s for shrinking violets. Gave all that bunk the heave-ho when I was nine. Knew by then life was a curse for shrinking violets. Earned myself a good education. Now I’ve got my foot on the ladder.’

  ‘Tell me more,’ said Paul.

  ‘Nothing to tell. Apart from making a decision.’

  ‘What decision?’ asked Paul.

  ‘Going to be a Member of Parliament by the time I’m thirty,’ said Miss Saunders.

  ‘Is that a fact?’

  ‘A promise. Where do I sit?’

  ‘Over there.’ Paul indicated a desk opposite his own. There was a chair and a typewriter.

  ‘Crummy,’ said Miss Saunders. ‘Listen, Adams. Let’s understand each other. I do what’s required of me, but I don’t take orders.’

  ‘Listen, Saunders,’ said Paul, ‘you’ll do what’s required and you’ll take orders.’

  ‘How old are you, bossy boots?’ asked Miss Saunders.

  ‘Fifty.’

  ‘What’s your real name, then? Peter Pan?’

  ‘How would you like to be fired before you start?’ asked Paul, thinking her name suited her. She was a Lulu all right, full stop.

  ‘That’s it, make me laugh,’ she said. ‘Suppose we get down to biz? Don’t like wasting time. What’s the schedule?’

  ‘Delivery of leaflets,’ said Paul. There was a large parcel on his desk, brown wrapping paper ripped open. ‘Five hundred. They came to us from the printers Saturday morning. See that satchel?’

  Miss Saunders saw it, hanging on the door peg.

  ‘Well?’ she said.

  ‘You carry the leaflets in that,’ said Paul, ‘and you spend the day knocking on doors, talking to tenants and leaving a leaflet at every house. Whenever you get no answer, slip a leaflet through the letter box.’

  ‘Listen, Adams—’

  ‘That’s all, Saunders,’ said Paul. ‘There’s a General Election coming early next year, and these are pre-election leaflets, spelling out the dangers of the Conservatives getting back in if we take victory for granted.’

  ‘Now you’re talking,’ said Miss Saunders. ‘Don’t want that bloody lot back in. Nor that warmonger, Churchill. Upper-class drunk. Wouldn’t surprise me if the Establishment made him Lord Churchill. Probably give him his own distillery too.’

  ‘Some of our voters like the old boy, even if they’d never vote Tory,’ said Paul. He fidgeted. ‘Forget upper class and titles.’

  ‘Forget ’em? Why?’ Between her shining black curtains, Lulu Saunders peered suspiciously at him. ‘That’s what we’re fighting, aren’t we?’

  ‘Don’t ask the converted,’ said Paul, ‘just talk to the people of Walworth about the points detailed in the leaflet.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ said Lulu. ‘Didn’t take this job on to deliver leaflets, did I?’

  ‘Consider it a pleasant surprise,’ said Paul. ‘Off you go. You can take all day. Tomorrow you can do some typing for me.’

  ‘I’ve got a feeling,’ said Lulu.

  ‘What feeling?’

  ‘That we’re not going to get on. You’re playing the superior male.’

  ‘How about that?’ said Paul. ‘Just when I was thinking what a superior female you are. Nice to have you with us.’

  ‘Someone here needs sorting out,’ said Lulu, ‘and it’s not me. Right, Adams, let’s have the bloody leaflets, then. But watch your back.’ Her spectacles looked threatening. ‘I’m a killer.’

  ‘Enjoy your day,’ said Paul.

  He felt better after she’d gone. After all, with luck, no-one need find out in due course that Sir Edwin Finch was any relative of his. And if anyone did, well, he could ride the upper-class stigma as an incorruptible Young Socialist.

  Miss Saunders. Why the long, ankle-length dress? Was she, one, a bluestocking? Two, a frump? Three, bow-legged? Not three, he hoped. If one or two, well, a bloke could forgive a girl for either if she had good stilts.

  Paul’s politics did not limit his interest in the opposite sex. As a young man, he naturally subscribed to the belief that politics exercised a bloke’s social awareness, and girls exercised his imagination.

  Sammy, Jimmy and Mr Greenberg arrived at the specified warehouse in Edmonton. Brick-built, with dusty skylights in its roof, it seemed old enough and grimy enough to date back to Roman times. There was a tough-looking geezer about four feet wide at the door.

  ‘Morning,’ said Sammy.

  ‘Name?’ growled Toughie.

  ‘Adams, Sammy Adams.’

  Toughie consulted a well-thumbed notebook.

  ‘Ain’t got no Adams,’ he said, ‘and if I ain’t got yer monicker, you ain’t getting in.’

  ‘Have another look,’ said Sammy, and Toughie did another scrutiny, thumbing pages.

  ‘Oh, I got yer,’ he said, ‘Jammy Adams. But hold on, who’s he and who’s him?’

  ‘Him’s my son and he’s my business consultant,’ said Sammy. It was black market all right, and only authorized dealers were going to be admitted. Well, he needn’t tell Susie.

  Toughie scrutinized Jimmy, then eyed Mr Greenberg. Mr Greenberg’s white-peppered beard advertised he was heading towards old age. His round rusty black hat was already there. But he still loved business and still pursued his rag-and-bone rounds in South London. He was also known north of the river.

  Toughie, grinning, addressed him.

  ‘Watcher, Eli, how yer doing, you old pirate? Nice to see yer.’

  ‘My pleasure, ain’t it?’ said Mr Greenberg.

  ‘Didn’t spot it was you at first,’ said Toughie. ‘Jammy Adams was in the way. All right, in yer go, you’ve got time to look at the apples and oranges before you place yer bids.’

  They entered the warehouse. Tiers of stout shelving on either side contained bales of material, and plain wooden stairs led up to the top tiers. Dealers, some furtive and some brazen, were making inspections of the wares. At the far end two men sat at a desk, observing the scene.

  Sammy was after bales of nylon, one of the modern man-made materials beginning to replace natural yarns. All bales were marked with a number.

  ‘So vhat do you think, Sammy?’ Eli’s whisper murmured through his beard.

  Sammy, noting a dealer talking to the men at the desk, said, ‘I think, Eli old cock, that that’s where we place our bids.’

  ‘Vell, Sammy,’ said Mr Greenberg, who had never lost his own kind of pronounced English, ‘it’s done that vay in some varehouses.’

  ‘Warehouses that don’t advertise?’ said Jimmy.

  ‘We won’t tell your mother,’ said Sammy.

  ‘Hello, hello,’ wheezed a squeezed set of tonsils, ‘who’s slumming it?’

  They turned to find an enormously fat man regarding them out of eyes set in blubber. Beside him was a large lump recognizable to Sammy as a bodyguard.

  ‘Well, well,’ Sammy said, ‘I think I know you, don’t I? You’re still putting on weight, y’know. How d’you manage it, seeing the rest of us are living on this austerity diet?’

  ‘Always the second-class funny bugger, are you?’ wheezed Ben Ford, the Fat Man. He turned to his large lump. ‘Ask him what he’s after.’

  ‘Mr Ford wants to know what you’re after,’ said Large Lump, his jaw looking like old concrete. ‘Tell him.’

  Dealers sidled around them as Sammy said, ‘Oh, bits and pieces, y’know.’

  ‘Tell him to lay off the nylon,’ wheezed the Fat Man.

  ‘Mr Ford says lay off the nylon,’ said Large Lump.

  ‘If I might put in a vord,’ said Mr Greenberg, ‘Mr Adams don’t take kindly to being told vhat he can and can’t do.’

  ‘That’s true, I don’t, normally,’ said Sammy amiably. ‘Still, they’re a lot bigger than we are, Eli, and I can make exceptions.’

  ‘We’ve come a long way to make exceptions, Dad,’ said
Jimmy.

  ‘Tiny, tell the runt to shut his cakehole,’ wheezed the Fat Man.

  ‘Button your bleedin’ lip,’ said Large Lump to Jimmy.

  ‘That’s not friendly,’ said Jimmy.

  ‘It’s what Mr Ford wants,’ said Large Lump.

  ‘Oh, well,’ said Sammy, ‘let’s go looking for allowable stuff, Jimmy. Come on, Eli.’

  They went looking. The bales of nylon were all on the bottom tier of shelving, together with rayon and very poor quality cotton. Sammy told Jimmy to pencil in certain numbers, and Jimmy did so, using a notebook. The Fat Man moved ponderously around, his wheezy breathing audible among the noise of dealers conferring with each other up above and down below. You bid for those, I’ll bid for these. That sort of thing.

  Large Lump was nowhere to be seen, but from the top tier of shelving a bale of rayon, all of a hundredweight, lost its place and came bounding down. Mr Greenberg, a wily old bird who always kept an eye on what he considered suspect, gave Sammy a hefty shove, and the bale thudded to the concrete floor well short of Sammy’s feet.

  Sammy controlled reactive shakes and said, ‘Well, who did that, I wonder?’

  ‘An accident, Sammy, ain’t it?’ said Mr Greenberg.

  ‘It would’ve been, if it had landed on my loaf of bread,’ said Sammy.

  Dealers were looking on with startled eyes. The Fat Man was breathing heavily. Up rushed one of the men from the desk.

  ‘What the bloody hell happened?’ he bawled, as Large Lump materialized beside the Fat Man.

  ‘That bale fell off the shelf,’ said Jimmy.

  ‘Ah, vas it falling or vas it pushed?’ murmured Mr Greenberg.

  The bloke from the desk, muttering, inspected the bale, then looked upwards at the top tier. There was an empty hole where the bale had rested, but that was all.

  ‘Don’t make sense,’ he muttered. ‘Still, no damage to the goods, gents, and by the way, all bids in before two o’clock.’ He returned to the desk.

  Sammy looked at the number on the fallen bale of rayon.

  ‘Twenty-seven, Jimmy,’ he said.

  ‘Eh?’ said Jimmy.

  ‘Twenty-seven,’ repeated Sammy very clearly.

  ‘Oh, right, got you, Dad,’ said Jimmy, and made a note of the number. The Fat Man and his Large Lump looked on from the other side of the shed.

  Dealers milled. Sammy, Jimmy and Mr Greenberg slowly traversed the place in a tour of inspection, Jimmy with his notebook at the ready. Now and again, it looked as if Sammy was quoting a rayon bale number.

  ‘Eli old cock,’ he murmured after a while, ‘accept my gratitude for saving me from going home flat.’

  ‘My pleasure, vasn’t it?’ said Mr Greenberg.

  ‘I think someone’s declared war,’ said Jimmy.

  ‘Well, Jimmy,’ said Sammy, ‘that kind of war happened before we got clouted by Hitler, and somehow the Fat Man was always close by. Now that he’s risen up from what I thought was the welcome departed, watch the Walworth store in case a Molotov cockroach comes flying in.’

  ‘Cocktail, Dad,’ said Jimmy.

  ‘Not for me, Jimmy, and they don’t sell ’em here,’ said Sammy.

  ‘I mean Molotov cocktail,’ said Jimmy.

  ‘Same thing,’ said Sammy, ‘they’re both ’orrible. And God bless Eli for saving me from a Molotov hundredweight.’

  ‘Ah, Sammy,’ said Mr Greenberg, ‘but vhere vas God vhen Himmler vas gassing and burning my people in his murder camps?’

  ‘Ask me another,’ said Sammy.

  ‘Weeping with His angels?’ suggested Jimmy.

  ‘I’ll go along with that,’ said Sammy, ‘and put down number forty-one, Jimmy.’ Reaching the end of their floor-level inspection, he added, ‘I don’t think we’ll go upstairs in case we fall through a trapdoor. We’ve got all the numbers I’m willing to bid for.’ He took the notebook from Jimmy, consulted it, whispered numbers to Mr Greenberg, slipped something into his hand, then said, ‘So will you have a word, Eli?’

  ‘So I vill, Sammy, von’t I?’ said Mr Greenberg.

  ‘At the usual commission,’ said Sammy.

  ‘My pleasure again, ain’t it?’ said Mr Greenberg, and he made his way through wandering dealers to the men at the desk, where he quoted certain numbers, but not twenty-seven, then made a proposition and, on reaching immediate agreement, handed over a large cash deposit. He then rejoined Sammy and Jimmy, and they all left.

  Chapter Eight

  ‘Fill me in, Eli,’ said Sammy, as they walked to his parked car.

  ‘Your deposit, Sammy, vas happily received on account of how much it vas. I vill go back at three, vhen the highest bids vill be honoured.’

  ‘Honoured?’ said Jimmy. ‘Is there honour in the black market, then?’

  ‘Ah, there is some, Jimmy my boy, you may be sure,’ said Mr Greenberg, ‘or – ah – accidents happen.’

  ‘I think I know about accidents,’ said Jimmy.

  ‘Vhen I go back at three, I vill, of course, find out vhat are the average highest bids for nylon bales.’

  ‘Won’t they be announced?’ asked Jimmy. His dad and Mr Greenberg looked at him. ‘Silly question,’ he said.

  ‘But I vill find out.’ Mr Greenberg’s little chuckle emerged but lost itself in his beard. ‘That vay your papa von’t be cheated, and vill add ten per cent to the highest bids made on the bales he vants, vhich the gentlemen at the desk vill make known to me. Then I vill have to pay any balance. In cash, Sammy.’

  ‘Which I’m confident I can supply from my wallet,’ said Sammy.

  ‘I presume,’ said Jimmy, ‘these kind of transactions are always in cash.’

  ‘Granted, a supply of the readies is always necessary,’ said Sammy, ‘but your mother needn’t know.’

  Jimmy grinned. He was beginning to understand that business was business whatever.

  ‘The bales must be collected tomorrow, vhich collection I vill do for you, Sammy, vith the help of my two sons.’ His stepsons, actually. But he was a fond father to them. There had been three until the eldest, serving with the Royal Navy, had been drowned when his ship, torpedoed in the Atlantic, blew up and sank. ‘I vill also deliver to your factory, Sammy, von’t I?’

  ‘Not in your open cart, Eli old cock, or the bales might get nicked by Dick Turpin,’ said Sammy. ‘Now let’s find a cafe and see if they’ll do us a light lunch of ham and eggs, except no ham for you, Eli. Kosher bangers instead?’

  ‘Vhat cafe will do kosher, Sammy?’

  ‘No idea,’ said Sammy. ‘I’m a foreigner here. So let’s go looking.’

  ‘Vell, Sammy, I think I know just the place,’ said Mr Greenberg. ‘In Lower Fore Street.’

  ‘Take note, Jimmy,’ said Sammy, ‘that if you want to know anything about London that you don’t know, our old friend Eli will supply you with the works.’

  ‘That’s a kind reference, Sammy, ain’t it?’ said Mr Greenberg, who sometimes woke up in the night and said a grateful prayer for never having been in danger of finding himself in a Nazi concentration camp.

  ‘By the way,’ said Sammy, as they reached the car, ‘cost of commission, collection and delivery, might I ask how much?’

  ‘Sammy, Sammy, vould I ask more than vhat you think is fair?’ said Mr Greenberg.

  ‘Half the shirt off my back, that’s fair,’ said Sammy, happy to have six bales of nylon for his factory, plus Mr Greenberg’s promise of pointing him at a reconditioned stocking-making machine.

  ‘Yes?’ said the woman on answering a knock on the front door of her house in Manor Place, Walworth.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ said Miss Lulu Saunders, who felt this must be the five hundredth house she’d called at, but knew it couldn’t be because she still had a large number of leaflets in the satchel. ‘You’re a Labour Party voter, of course? Good, I—’

  ‘What d’yer mean, good?’ said the woman.

  ‘Your husband’s a worker?’

  ‘So am I, I’ve got four kid
s and they’re all terrors.’

  ‘You’re a prime worker,’ said Lulu. ‘You’re all benefiting from our Labour government. Want that to continue, don’t you?’

  ‘Leave off, I’m still doing me week’s washing,’ said the woman. ‘Kindly hoppit.’ She shut the door. Lulu stuffed a leaflet through the letter box.

  Her day so far hadn’t been joyful. Only a relatively few people had cared to discuss politics with her. Most didn’t want to discuss anything except something like why was meat still rationed considering there was plenty of live beef plodding about in the countryside. And others weren’t at home.

  She knocked at the next house. The door was opened by a rugged-looking bloke in trousers, shirt and braces. He had a half-eaten slice of cake in his hand.

  ‘Afternoon,’ said Lulu.

  He looked her over.

  ‘Afternoon,’ he said, ‘what can I do for you?’

  ‘You’re a Labour Party voter?’

  ‘I’m nobody’s voter. I hate politicians.’

  ‘Such as the Tories?’ said Lulu.

  ‘All of ’em.’

  ‘You need talking to about the Labour Party,’ said Lulu, favouring the possibility of converting the bloke.

  ‘Right,’ he said, ‘come in and have a cup of char and a slice of cake, and I’ll lend you my ear.’

  That was the first time Lulu had encountered a real welcome.

  ‘Pleasure,’ she said.

  Ten minutes later she was on her way out. What had been on offer was not just tea, cake and a willing ear, but also his bedroom, and the pleasure of rolling in the hay with him, since he had a thing about females in glasses. But he made it clear that her mauve dress didn’t suit her, so let’s get rid of it, you sexpot. Lulu floored him at the moment when he had her dress nearly up to her knickers, the saucy cowboy. She used the satchel, heavy with leaflets. She left him on the floor, seeing double.

  Sammy, Jimmy and Mr Greenberg were on their way home, the transaction having been completed over an exchange of whispers and the inaudible rustle of a sheaf of the readies. If whispers were synonymous with the black market, the readies were what kept it going. Sammy had principles, of course, but could stretch them for the sake of his business.