The Way Ahead

by Mary Jane Staples

  ‘I’m supposed to be getting you ready for bed,’ said Sammy, as mentally and physically up to the mark at nearly forty-two as he had been when running a market stall at eighteen.

  ‘Just once more, please,’ said Phoebe, so he set her down and a new chase began, Phoebe shrieking as she scampered around. Up the stairs and into the bedroom came Paula.

  ‘Well, I just don’t know, I’m sure,’ she said, taking off Chinese Lady, her never-failing grandma. Her fair hair, loose, was shining from a brushing, and she wore a dressing-gown over her nightie. ‘I simply don’t know what I’m going to make of you two, and Mummy says that if you bring the house down, Daddy, you’ll be for it. And Daniel said he can hardly hear what the wireless is saying. And Grandma says she didn’t bring you up to make a racket.’

  Sammy and Susie, still living with his mother and stepfather in the Red Post Hill house, had decided to stay until the war was over, when they would rebuild on the site of their bombed home. Chinese Lady and her husband, Edwin Finch, had no objections whatever to an indefinite stay by Susie, Sammy, the two young girls, and their brother Daniel. The large house had six bedrooms.

  ‘Mummy and Grandma said that, did they, Plum Pudding?’ said Sammy.

  ‘Yes, Daddy, they did,’ said Paula.

  ‘Oh, my eye,’ said Sammy.

  ‘Oh, crikey,’ said Phoebe, and darted a glance at Sammy. He tried to look like a guilty man, but failed. A little grin came and went, and Phoebe smothered a giggle.

  ‘And another thing,’ said Paula, a young lady with a tongue, ‘Mummy says to remind you that Emma and Jonathan will be here in five minutes.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Sammy. ‘Emma and Jonathan, right,’ he said. ‘Teeth, Phoebe. Jump about.’

  ‘Daddy, I already done my teeth,’ said Phoebe.

  ‘Have you?’ said Sammy.

  ‘Oh, dear, oh, dear,’ said Paula, ‘I think you’re a bit wobbly from making a racket, Daddy. Never mind, you’ll be better later.’

  Only a little later, in fact, when the girls were in bed, Sammy was well enough to answer the door to Emma and Jonathan himself. It was the last full day of the young couple’s week at home, and Sammy had asked them to drop in.

  ‘Here we are, Uncle Sammy,’ said Emma, fresh as a bird at morning’s first light, despite spending the whole afternoon in and around the Denmark Hill area. She and Jonathan had been trying to decide on the kind of house in which they would like to begin their post-war life. It was a prolonged outing embracing ideas, visions, hopes and optimism.

  ‘Glad to see you,’ said Sammy, and gave his likeable niece a hug and a smacker before shaking Jonathan’s hand. ‘Jonathan, forgot to ask you about your tin knee when me and Susie saw you at the beginning of your leave. How’s it doing?’

  ‘Rattling a bit,’ said Emma.

  ‘I call it operative,’ said Jonathan who, like all the younger relatives, thought Sammy an eternal live wire. ‘So, I’m grateful to it, fond of it, and hanging on to it.’

  ‘I’m fond of it too,’ said Emma. ‘We’re a proud trio, Mum and Rosie and me, we all fly the flag for our husbands’ brave legs.’ She spoke light-heartedly, then made a little face. ‘Considering everything else, Uncle Sammy, we’re lucky.’

  ‘We’re all lucky, Emma, all of us who are still alive,’ said Sammy, remembering the months of the sustained blitz on London, and the night when he, Susie and Paula, in their air raid shelter, had heard the shattering roar of the exploding bomb that had razed their house. ‘And I’ll say this much, Jonathan looks as if he could climb trees all day, and you look as if you’d never be far behind.’

  ‘Yes, him Tarzan, me Jane,’ said Emma. ‘Oh, hello, Aunt Susie, love your dress.’

  Susie, coming through the hall, was wearing a jersey wool dress of royal blue, a blue that always did so much for her fair looks. She was thirty-nine and the thought of being forty in August didn’t exactly exhilarate her. Every year seemed to fly, even in wartime. She could hardly believe the country had been involved in an utterly vicious conflict with Hitler’s Germany for well over four years, and against Japan for more than two. Susie could sense the country being drained of its best men and its strength. Soldiers, sailors, airmen and yes, merchant seamen too. Time after time the news referred to the loss of merchant shipping and the drowning of the crews. The German U-boats were the wolves of the Atlantic and the North Sea, hunting in packs, although the Royal Navy and the American Navy, with the help of long-ranging Sunderland flying-boats, were gradually getting the upper hand. And no U-boats could touch those fast-running troopships and armament carriers, the Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, in their voyages to and from New York.

  Susie still put her faith in Prime Minister Winston Churchill, a bulldog turned lion. She was still sure he could outmatch Hitler, especially as his American allies were proving awesomely powerful. And their GIs were proving irresistibly fraternal. Shy girls shrieked and ran home to their mothers when they saw them coming. Most girls did no such thing. They liked the breezy, extrovert gum-chewing Americans.

  Susie greeted Emma and Jonathan affectionately, exchanging kisses with them.

  ‘Lovely to see you again,’ she said. ‘We’ll talk in the parlour, shall we? Sammy has something to say to you. We won’t keep you long as it’s your last evening.’

  On the table in the parlour were glasses, a bottle of beer and a bottle of port. They sat down around the table, and Sammy poured port for Emma and Susie, and beer for Jonathan and himself. The beer frothed to a fine white head on which bubbles sparkled and popped.

  ‘Now,’ said Sammy, ‘here’s to you two young people, well and truly married, which my dear old Ma is all in favour of and said so on the happy occasion when your Aunt Susie had the good sense to marry me. Or was it the other way round?’

  ‘Well, I think the world of you, Uncle Sammy,’ said Emma, ‘but I also think it was the other way round.’

  ‘Granted,’ said Sammy. ‘My lucky day that was, and I won’t deny it.’

  ‘Granted,’ said Susie.

  ‘I weren’t there myself,’ said Jonathan, ‘but durned if I don’t believe you, Aunt Susie. No offence, Uncle Sammy.’

  ‘None taken,’ said Sammy genially. ‘You two have been looking for your kind of dream castle today, right?’

  ‘Oh, a kind of wander into the realms of wishful thinking,’ said Emma, ‘to give ourselves lovely ideas of what we’d like for our post-war home, even if we know we’d have to start with something modest. Jonathan’s saving as much as he can out of his sergeant’s pay, and I’m saving as much as I can out of my farm pay.’

  ‘Well, it’s a fact you’ll need somewhere to live,’ said Sammy.

  ‘It’s the usual thing, Uncle Sammy,’ said Jonathan, enjoying his light ale, which an off-licence keeper had produced from under his counter for Sammy, along with another bottle. Sammy had his way of getting various shopkeepers to forage about under their counters for consumables and other items in short supply. ‘We go along with having a roof and a front door.’

  ‘Well, Jonathan, we don’t want you to be like Flanagan and Allen, living underneath the arches,’ smiled Susie.

  ‘Too draughty, Aunt Susie,’ said Jonathan, returning her smile, and Emma thought what a nice face her country chap had, firm and manly, with good humour written all over it. That didn’t mean he was a soft-speaking sergeant, an easy touch for recruits. She’d met some of his fellow NCOs, and they’d told her that when Jonathan was delivering reprimands to a squad of trainee gunners, the shock waves cracked teacups in the camp Naafi. ‘Yes, we’d prefer a roof and a tidy old amount of bricks and mortar,’ he said.

  ‘With a garden,’ said Emma.

  ‘Emma,’ said Sammy, ‘d’you happen to know the firm’s in the property business?’

  ‘Oh, I know,’ said Emma, sipping her port. ‘Grandma keeps us all informed of everything.’

  ‘Ought to be Minister of Information,’ said Sammy, lively blue eyes conveying a hint that an in
teresting announcement was about to come forth. ‘Now it so happens that our property company has just acquired a house in Ferndene Road off Denmark Hill.’

  ‘For you and Aunt Susie to rent from the firm?’ said Emma.

  ‘Rent’s money down the drain,’ said Sammy, looking pained.

  ‘In any case,’ said Susie, ‘Sammy and me are going to have a new house built on the site of our bombed one, just as soon as the war is over.’

  ‘Incorporating some of your own ideas?’ said Jonathan. ‘I’d call that exciting.’

  ‘Mentally, Susie’s already built the kitchen,’ said Sammy, ‘a bit on the lines of Buckingham Palace. She’s well known to me and our kids for being mental.’

  ‘You’ll be well known for having a large hole in your head in a minute,’ said Susie.

  ‘Noted,’ said Sammy. ‘Where was I? I got it, yes. In regard to this lately acquired desirable residence in Ferndene Road, we thought we’d hold it for you two, Jonathan, and to let you buy it from the firm on an instalment basis if you’d like to move in after the war. Of course, there’d be a bit of reasonable interest chargeable. When I say reasonable, I mean it won’t give you and Emma heartburn or fainting fits, unlike the arm-twisting interest charged by loan companies. What we had in mind was a fair return for the firm.’

  ‘Uncle Sammy!’ Emma sat up straight and looked Sammy in the eye.

  ‘Do I suspect you’re offended?’ said Sammy.

  ‘Offended?’ said Emma. ‘I should say not. Well, I’m not, and neither is Jonathan, are you, Jonathan?’

  ‘I don’t feel any kind of offence coming on,’ said Jonathan. ‘I feel more like I’m falling off this chair.’ That reaction out of the way, he eyed Sammy seriously. ‘Mr Adams, are we talking about a house and home waiting for Emma and me as soon as the war’s over?’

  ‘That’s the idea,’ said Sammy.

  It’s a lovely house,’ said Susie, ‘fully detached, with four bedrooms, a boxroom, large kitchen, and apple trees in the garden.’

  ‘Oh, my sainted aunt,’ said Emma.

  ‘Is that me?’ smiled Susie.

  ‘No, I meant – well, yes, why not?’ said Emma. ‘I know Ferndene Road, and I know the kind of properties there. Jonathan knows it too, but only because it was one of the roads we took in this afternoon.’ She looked at Jonathan, her mouth parted and excited little breaths escaping. ‘Say something, Jonathan.’

  ‘I will,’ said Jonathan. ‘Could I ask you to outline the terms, Uncle Sammy?’

  ‘It was an offer, fully furnished, for a sum that hurt me ears,’ said Sammy. ‘But the firm acquired it for five-ten, which was only slightly painful. Terms for you and Emma? Well, you pay for it at the rate of seven pounds a month for six years, plus ten per cent simple interest, which is fourteen bob a month, and which means that at the end of six years it’ll have cost you five hundred and sixty-one quid in all. That’s a lot less than if you took out a loan or a mortgage. Fair?’

  ‘Fairer than anything else I ever heard of,’ said Jonathan.

  ‘Especially as Aunt Susie says the house is lovely,’ said Emma, flushed with sheer delight. ‘I can always believe you, Aunt Susie.’

  ‘Thank you, Emma,’ smiled Susie.

  ‘Uncle Sammy, we adore the prospect of having the house on those terms,’ enthused Emma. ‘Jonathan will tell you so too, won’t you, Jonathan?’

  ‘I think I’ve already made that clear,’ said Jonathan. ‘It’s a very fair deal, Uncle Sammy.’

  ‘All in the family,’ said Sammy. ‘Right now, it’s let on a lease for the duration of the war to an American major and his wife. He’s holding down a centenary job with the Allied Command’s London headquarters.’

  ‘Centenary?’ said Jonathan.

  ‘That’s it, it’s a desk job,’ said Sammy.

  ‘Sedentary?’ suggested Jonathan.

  ‘Knew it was something like that,’ said Sammy blithely.

  ‘Yes, something like that,’ smiled Susie.

  ‘The rent from this happy Yank, who wangled a passage over for his Philadelphia missus, helps us look after genuine maintenance costs as landlords,’ said Sammy. ‘Which means we don’t pay for any furniture or windows they break if they have a ding-dong. Just any natural deterioration. It’ll leave a bit over for the property firm’s bank account, which is a consideration that accords with Susie’s business principles.’

  ‘Mine, Sammy?’ said Susie.

  ‘Glad you’ve got the right kind, Susie,’ said Sammy. ‘What I’m saying, Jonathan, is that when you and Emma move in after Hitler’s been fried, the house’ll be in good order. Mind, I won’t be able to speak for the furniture, which’ll depend on how Major Happy Yank and Mrs Happy Yank use it.’

  ‘I’m not going to object to them having happy times on the sofa, and I won’t be bothered if the armchairs take a beating,’ said Jonathan. ‘I’ve got a job lined up with a firm of City accountants after the war, so I’ll sign up on your terms, Uncle Sammy.’

  ‘As Jonathan’s better half,’ said Emma, ‘I’ll sign up too. Aunt Susie, I don’t believe in wives being left out of important documents, do you?’

  ‘I’ve had some problems with Sammy, Emma,’ said Susie, ‘but I’ve straightened them all out. And Sammy too,’ she added as a thinking woman’s afterthought.

  Sammy grinned.

  ‘Have you got problems yourself, Uncle Sammy?’ asked Jonathan with a grin.

  ‘Only Susie,’ said Sammy. ‘Well, that’s it, then, glad you young people are happy about everything.’

  ‘Uncle Sammy,’ said Emma, ‘why are you doing this for me and Jonathan?’

  ‘It’s a family business,’ said Sammy, ‘and what we’re doing for you and Jonathan is good business for all concerned.’

  ‘Well, bless you and the business,’ said Emma.

  ‘It’s still light,’ said Susie, ‘so if you and Jonathan have got time, would you like Sammy to run you up to Ferndene Road to look at the house?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Emma.

  Ferndene Road wasn’t far, being on the opposite side of Denmark Hill to Red Post Hill, but Sammy took the young couple in his car. He pulled up outside the house in question, and Emma and Jonathan took in its aspect. Double-fronted with a central porch and latticed windows, it was built of attractive multicoloured brick. It was typically suburban. The Denmark Hill area, close though it was to Camberwell and Walworth, did have a look more suburban than urban. Emma, well-read, knew a certain kind of knowing people would call the house pseudo-something-or-other, but as far as she was concerned it represented a dream post-war beginning for herself and Jonathan. And their post-war children. It was like other houses in the area that they’d admired, larger than they thought they’d be able to afford, but Uncle Sammy’s offer brought it within reach, even though he hadn’t offered it on a long-term basis. Six years was better business for the firm, and Emma could understand that.

  ‘Just say if you think it’s not what you’d like,’ said Sammy.

  ‘Love it,’ said Emma.

  ‘Family house,’ said Jonathan.

  Lights were on and there was a faint sound of music.

  ‘Seems like the tenants are throwing a party,’ said Sammy, ‘so I can’t ask ’em to let you look around. But you’ve got my word it’s pretty handsome, and you can always decorate to suit your own tastes.’

  ‘We’re happy as things stand,’ said Jonathan, thinking he’d be able to afford nearly two pounds a week out of his wages. He’d been promised a starting salary of eighteen pounds a month because of his pre-war experience with accountants at Camberwell Green. The offer of the job had come from Captain Bradshaw, a peacetime partner in the City firm, and presently an officer on the cadre of the training camp.

  Sammy drove the young couple back to Red Post Hill, where they spent some time with Chinese Lady, Mr Finch and Daniel, a young man with some of Sammy’s electricity. Emma was bubbling over, and Chinese Lady, approving of the arrangement, said it was goi
ng to be nice having her and Jonathan living in the family area, and that Sammy had always had his good points, even if he wasn’t always as respectful as he ought to be and spent too much time thinking about money.

  ‘Oh, well, he doesn’t keep it in his old socks any more, Mum,’ said Susie. ‘Most of it’s in the bank.’

  ‘It should be fairly safe there,’ said Mr Finch.

  ‘I’ll have a look at it, if you like, Dad,’ said Daniel. ‘Say at a charge of one per cent.’

  ‘Sammy, that makes me ask if you go and count it sometimes to make sure it’s all there,’ said Chinese Lady.

  ‘In a manner of speaking, once a year at audit time,’ said Sammy.

  ‘Well, I suppose once a year’s enough if you trust the bank,’ said Chinese Lady.

  ‘Just as much as old socks, Ma,’ said Sammy.

  ‘I don’t know what Emma and Jonathan think of you calling me Ma,’ said Chinese Lady. ‘I’ve told you a hundred times it’s common. Still, you’ve been very family-minded about the house for them, so I won’t go on at you. We all hope it’ll make a nice home for you and Emma, Jonathan, which I’m sure you both deserve, and I must say it’s a blessing you’ve got a healthy job on a farm, Emma, instead of being a woman soldier like Eloise. I can’t say I’ll ever believe women ought to be soldiers. Look what might have happened if Rosie and your Aunt Polly had been soldiers when their babies were due. A fine thing that would have been, having their babies with guns going off.’

  Mr Finch coughed, as was his wont when Chinese Lady’s observations were a bit over the top.

  ‘Um, I think that would have been avoided, Maisie,’ he said.

  ‘I should hope so,’ said Chinese Lady.

  ‘I never fancied soldiering myself, Grandma, and I like doing my bit on the land,’ said Emma, thinking how alert and sprightly her grandma was at sixty-seven. She still seemed to keep an eye on everyone, whether they were at home or away. Grandpa Finch was beginning to age a bit, but even at seventy he still had a distinguished look, and went to his Government work every day, being determined to give his services until the war ended. His department must think a lot of him, or they’d have insisted on retiring him. ‘Uncle Sammy and the family firm have made Jonathan and me very happy, Grandma, but we really must go now.’