London Pride

by Beryl Kingston

  Peggy and Baby followed at his heels, trotting to keep up with him, for despite his burden he was walking very quickly.

  ‘Here it is,’ he said, stopping by his car and lowering Joan into the passenger seat. ‘Get in and I will take you home.’

  Which he did, driving them the long way round through Gomshall and up the farm path they’d climbed on that first day, so long ago now. And when the path stopped, he parked the car neatly beside the hedge and escorted them right up to the kitchen door.

  Aunt Maud opened the door.

  ‘I return your niece to your care, Miss Potter,’ he said. ‘If you will allow me to advise you, I think you should put her to bed as soon as possible. She had a fainting spell in the churchyard and she still isn’t at all well.’

  Aunt Maud thanked him in some confusion. ‘Very kind of you, Father.’

  ‘Not at all,’ the reverend gentleman said. ‘Treat her gently, Miss Potter. I really do think she’s been punished enough, wouldn’t you say.’

  Aunt Maud didn’t say anything, but her face was rigid with a combination of suppressed anger and fear, because it sounded as though he knew what Joan had done and how they’d dealt with it.

  ‘Come in,’ she said grimly to her nieces, when the rector had swished back to his car. ‘What your grandfather will say when he hears about this, I do not know.’

  ‘He knows about it,’ Peggy said, fighting back to protect her sister. ‘He was the one took us down to the churchyard. He was the one made Joan faint.’

  If she’d hoped to gain any sympathy, she was badly mistaken. ‘Don’t you dare say such a thing about your grandfather,’ her aunt roared, red-faced with anger.

  ‘It’s true. He did.’

  ‘You say another word,’ Aunt Maud said furiously, ‘an’ I’ll wash your mouth out with soap and water. The shame of it! I shall never hold my head up again. For the Father to know! The shame of it!’

  The three girls stood awkwardly before her in the kitchen, not knowing what they were supposed to do or say, Joan ashamed, Baby afraid and Peggy burning with anger because it was all so unfair.

  And grandfather kicked into the kitchen, boots first, red in the face and breathless as though he’d been running. ‘Where’s your damn mother?’ he roared. ‘Always out galli-vantin’, God damn it.’ And he pushed at Baby who was the nearest to his anger. ‘Get out my way, dammit.’

  ‘Leave her alone!’ Mum said, arriving home just in time to see the shove and running in through the open door to fold her precious child in her arms. ‘What’s she done? It’s not her fault. It’s that wretch you should be shoving about.’ Glaring at Joan.

  Baby burst into tears to show how hard done by she was. And then all three grown-ups began to shout at the same time and at the tops of their voices, not listening to one another.

  ‘Sluts! Harlots!’ Grandpa roared, puce in the face and stamping his feet with every word. ‘I should never have taken you in. Dirty sluts, the lot of you! You deserve everything that’s coming to you. You should never have been born …’

  ‘Nobody cares for me!’ Mum shrieked. ‘My nerves are in rags! Rags! How could you do this to me? I simply don’t understand. Don’t you care that you’ll make me ill? For a poor widow woman to be treated so …’

  ‘The entire village knows, I hope you realize,’ Aunt Maud shouted. ‘The entire village. We shall all be ruined. I shall never hold my head up again. If the Father knows. He came here, right to my door. You’re not even safe in your own home …’

  The noise of their anger was so dreadful it made Peggy’s stomach shake. This is what it must be like to be in a war, she thought, stuck in the trenches with the enemy firing their guns at you and not able to run away or fight back or anything. Oh please God, make them stop.

  And as if in answer to her prayer Mum and Maud both stopped shouting and now it was only Grandpa’s voice ranting on. ‘… you and your filthy brood, Flossie Furnivall. I’m glad you ain’t a Potter no more an’ that’s a fact.’

  ‘If you hadn’t taken ’em all down to the village no one would’ve known,’ Mum said bitterly. Which showed that she must have heard some of the things Maud had been saying. ‘I kept ’em in, I hope you realize.’

  ‘And now you can take ’em all out,’ Grandpa said viciously. ‘That’s what you can do. Take ’em all out.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’ Mum said. ‘Take ’em all out where?’

  ‘Out a’ my house,’ Grandpa said. ‘That’s where. I’ve had the bailiff up to see me, I’ll have you know. You’re to be out by the end a’ next week, he sez, or I lose the cottage. That’s what he sez. Be lucky if I don’t lose me job an’ all. You’re to get out. You an’ your shameful brood. Before we start the harvest. That’s what he sez. Now you know.’

  ‘But we can’t,’ Mum wailed, changing in an instant from open-mouthed abuse to pathetic whining. ‘Where would we go? I’m just a poor widow woman. You know that. I need someone to take care of me. Where could we possibly go?’

  ‘Should ha’ thought a’ that before you let that trollop loose.’

  ‘You must let us stay,’ she insisted. ‘We shall be homeless.’

  ‘By the end a’ next week,’ Grandpa said. ‘That’s all there is to it. I’m off out.’

  ‘What about your supper?’ Aunt Maud said.

  ‘Give it to the pig.’

  ‘Oh, that’s nice!’ Mum said, weeping. ‘Walk out on us, I should. You don’t care what happens to anyone, you hateful man. You don’t care for me. You never did. Or poor Baby. What did she ever do? Oh! Oh! I shall be ill and it’ll be all your fault.’ And as her father crashed out of the front door and crunched off along the path, she blundered through the door to the stairs and stumbled up to the bedroom.

  The kitchen was suddenly and horribly quiet.

  ‘And you lot can stay in the yard,’ Aunt Maud said. ‘I’ve had enough for one day.’

  They sat in the barn with Peggy’s cat and talked things over. And over and over.

  ‘Where will we go?’ Joan said. ‘Oh God, Peg, this is all my fault. Where will we go?’

  ‘Wherever Mum takes us I expect,’ Peggy said.

  But as they were to discover in the next few fraught days their mother had opted out of the situation altogether.

  ‘I can’t get up,’ she said to Aunt Maud next morning, lying in the tangle of the bedclothes with her eyes shut. ‘I’m far too ill. I should collapse.’

  Her illness didn’t impress Grandpa. ‘You can roll around in bed all you like, gel,’ he called up the stairs to her. ‘Don’t make no odds to me. You’re out of here next Friday. That’s all there is to that.’

  The weekend came and went and she was still in bed.

  ‘If we’ve really go to get out when Grandpa says, where are we going to go?’ Baby worried, when Monday morning brought no change.

  The three girls were out in the vegetable garden, weeding, Joan and Peggy with hoes and Baby with a rather useless trowel.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Joan said wearily. ‘I don’t know what’s to become of any of us.’

  The weight of a necessary decision finally settled on Peggy’s shoulders. ‘I’ll see to it,’ she told her sisters. ‘I promised Dad I’d look after Mum, an’ if she’s ill she can’t look after herself.’ And Joan was too low to know what to do and Baby too young. ‘You carry on here and I’ll see to it.’

  ‘What will you do?’ Joan asked. ‘Where will you start?’

  ‘I shall write to Uncle Gideon in Greenwich.’

  She wrote that very minute, taking pen, ink and paper up into the bedroom for a bit of privacy.

  ‘Dear Uncle Gideon,’ she said.

  ‘We have got to get out of the cottage by the end of the week. There has been a row. Please could you find us somewhere to live in Greenwich. Mum has a pension and Joan will go to work.

  ‘I am sorry to trouble you.

  ‘Your ever-loving niece, Peggy Furnivall.’

  Aunt Maud pulled a sour gr
imace when she came downstairs with the letter but handed over the address almost at once.

  ‘Greenwich,’ Peggy said as she wrote the word. ‘Where is it, Aunt Maud?’

  ‘Well bless me, don’t you know that,’ Aunt Maud said. ‘It’s in London. Right in the heart of London.’

  ‘London!’ Peggy thought with a wonderful rush of relief and hope. But what a marvellous thing! If Uncle Gideon’ll only help us we can all go back to London. I’ll take the poor cat.

  She was aware in one part of her mind that her mother wouldn’t approve, but she pushed the thought away. It was high time the poor thing was rescued from that awful Josh and if they were going to London it would be all right in the end.

  ‘You won’t get much joy from Uncle Gideon,’ Aunt Maud warned as she put her address book back in the dresser. ‘Keeps hisself to hisself, he do.’

  But this time she was proved wrong. That Friday, on the very day they were supposed to be leaving, ten minutes after Grandpa had grumbled off to work, and just when Joan and Peggy had given up hope of answer, Uncle Gideon came down to the farm, in person and his employer’s butcher’s van.

  ‘He give us a lend of it,’ he said, breezing into the kitchen all red-faced and bulky and dependable. ‘Good bloke our Mr Pearson. ‘Lo Maudie. You kids’ll have to sit on the floor. There’s only the one seat next to the driver. You packed are you, Flossie? I got you a place in Paradise Row.’

  Mum had drifted down the stairs wearing an old dressing-gown and a bewildered expression.

  ‘Oh gor’ blin’ ol’ Reilly!’ he said, with exasperated affection. ‘What you doin’ in that rig? I promised I’d be back by three o’clock.’

  Mum was gaping like a goldfish. ‘Back?’ she said. ‘Where we going, Gideon?’

  ‘Greenwich,’ her brother said.

  ‘Nobody told me,’ Mum complained.

  ‘Your Peggy wrote to him,’ Maud said. ‘Have you really got ’em somewhere, Gid?’

  ‘Only if they look sharp,’ Gideon said, ‘so get your skates on, Flossie.’

  The realization that her impossible problem had actually been solved lifted Flossie’s spirits into a thistledown gaiety. ‘I can’t guarantee skates,’ she said, ‘but I shall have my clothes on in two shakes of a lamb’s tail, you see if I don’t. Oh Gid, it is good of you to look after us. Can you take a trunk?’

  ‘If it’s packed in half an hour,’ Gideon said, grimacing at Peggy and Joan. ‘Two minutes more an’ I’ll go without you.’

  It took three quarters of an hour to pack the trunk but it was done with such cheerfulness that it hardly seemed a minute. The china tea-set had never been unpacked and neither had the dinner service or the cutlery, so they were lifted out of the trunk still in their packing cases, dust and all, and carried off into the butcher’s van straight away. Then the three children set about gathering up their belongings. Flossie had never been any good at packing, and now her inefficiency was a positive talent. She threw things into the trunk with cheerful abandon.

  ‘It’s only an old saucepan,’ she cried, and ‘Don’t bother folding. We can iron when we’re there. Poke the flat irons down the corners. That china dog can go in me spare shoes.’ They were all so happy it was as if they were going on holiday. Even Joan was smiling and that really was a wonder because she cried so much these days.

  While the last few things were being muddled into odd corners of the trunk and Aunt Maud was saying they’d all have to sit on the lid to get it shut, Peggy took one of Mum’s old hat boxes from the cupboard under the eaves, picked up a jug half full of milk from the larder and a saucer from the dresser and sneaked off to the barn to find her cat.

  It was crouched on one of the crossbeams watching the straw for mice, but when it saw Peggy it stood up at once, stretched and came leaping down.

  ‘We’re going away from here,’ Peggy told it, stroking its back as it lapped the milk. ‘Your next kittens are going to be Londoners and none of them are going to be drowned. It’s all going to be quite different now.’ And while she was talking her mind was busy working out the best way to get the cat into the box before it could realize what was happening or start fighting.

  When the saucer was clean she picked the cat up in her arms the way she often did, then holding it firmly with both hands, and still murmuring, she lowered it quickly into the box. The cat was instantly alarmed and began to growl, clawing the sides of the box, and Peggy’s restraining hand, in a frantic attempt to scrabble out, but Peggy held on and jammed the lid on tight just before its head could push up and out. She was panting with effort and there was a long angry red scratch on her left hand but the job was done. She tied the lid down with an old piece of rope, poked air holes in the lid with a stick and then picked up the box and strode off with it to the van, which had now been driven off the path and over the rough grass and was standing incongruously right in front of the door.

  Mum and Aunt Maud and Uncle Gideon were struggling out of the cottage with the trunk, and Mum was still giggling even though Aunt Maud was cross.

  ‘All aboard,’ Uncle Gideon called out cheerfully. ‘Soon be off.’

  So she climbed into the van. It was dark inside and smelled of raw meat and dried blood. There was dirty sawdust on the floor and there were flies everywhere, crawling the walls and buzzing and bouncing about the ceiling.

  ‘What’ve you got there?’ Baby said from the shadows. She and Joan were sitting on the packing cases.

  ‘The cat,’ Peggy said, settling her swearing burden in the corner furthest from the door.

  ‘You’re not bringing a cat!’ Baby said in surprise.

  ‘Yes,’ Joan said firmly, understanding and supporting at once. ‘We are. And anyway it’s nothing to do with you.’

  ‘I’ll tell Mum,’ Baby started. ‘She’ll be ever so …’

  ‘You would, wouldn’t you?’ Joan said. ‘You’re a horrid little thing sometimes.’

  ‘You do,’ Peggy said, sitting down beside the horrid little thing and flexing her fingers menacingly to make her meaning quite plain, ‘an’ I’ll pinch you all the way to London.’

  The trunk was heaved aboard. Baby kept a wary eye on Peggy’s fingers and said nothing. The doors were closed, leaving them with the flies in a horrid foetid twilight. Mum and Uncle Gideon climbed into their seats, making the van rock as though it was going to fall over sideways. The engine coughed and spluttered. Aunt Maud called goodbye. They were off.

  Apart from Mum’s incessant chatter, it was a quiet journey, once the cat had stopped swearing. Joan was feeling depressed and guilty and Peggy and Baby were too busy with their thoughts to want to talk much.

  Baby had spent the last week trying to puzzle out the meaning of all the odd things that had been happening in their family ever since that letter arrived. She couldn’t do it because nobody had explained anything to her, not even Peggy, but she’d gleaned enough from half sentences and meaning glances and innuendo to be aware that Joan’s sin – and it was a sin, Grandpa had said so that awful time in the churchyard – Joan’s sin had something to do with letting a man touch you – and she knew that because Aunt Maud had warned her about it.

  ‘Don’t you never let a man touch you, gel, never,’ she’d said, sternly. ‘It ain’t worth it.’

  And Baby had given her solemn promise. ‘No, Aunt. I won’t.’

  And now here they all were running away from Tilling-bourne because ‘everybody knew’. But what did they know? That was the question nobody would answer. In fact that was a question that was so awful she couldn’t even ask it. Men must be terribly dangerous to cause all this, she thought. And yet they didn’t look dangerous. Grandpa was frightening when he got in a temper and shouted. And Josh wasn’t very nice when he kicked the cats. But most of them looked soppy really, especially when they were dressed up for the pub. It was all very worrying. Sins you weren’t supposed to commit and you didn’t know what they were. Men all round you who were dangerous and you didn’t know how they were goi
ng to be dangerous, so you couldn’t protect yourself. Well one thing, she thought, I shan’t let any of them touch me. Ever.

  Over in the other corner of the van, Peggy was thinking too. She was on her way back to London at last so she should have been excited and happy, but she wasn’t. She was glad they were going, of course, but what she was feeling was really no more than a vague satisfaction, like a shadow in the back of her mind. Over and above that she felt weighed down with all her newly-accepted responsibilities. It was all her doing that they were moving to London. What if it was the wrong thing? She’d taken over the care of her mother, which she’d had to do because she’d promised Dad and there wasn’t anyone else to do it. Joan couldn’t help her yet because she was still so unhappy. And Baby was worse than useless. What if she couldn’t manage to look after them all properly? Mum could be ever so difficult. And then there was the cat. It was stifling hot in the van and the poor thing was still tied up inside the hatbox. It could be suffocating for all she knew and yet she couldn’t untie the box and let it out, because it would be frightened and it would probably run all over the place and then she’d never be able to get it back in the box again to carry it safely out of the van and into the house.

  Sighing, she clung to the edge of the trunk, as the van jolted over the pot-holes and the flies buzzed angrily at being disturbed. Never trouble trouble, till trouble troubles you, she reminded herself. It’s silly to worry before you have to. We’ll be in London soon and then everything will be all right. I wonder how far it is?

  CHAPTER 9

  ‘I can’t live here,’ Flossie squealed. ‘Where are we?’

  The van had jolted to a halt in a short narrow street somewhere north of Greenwich Station. There wasn’t a butcher’s shop in sight, just a corner shop and a terrace of eight plain houses on one side of the street and a pub and a wood-yard on the other.

  ‘Paradise Row,’ her brother said, grinning at it. ‘Number six’s yours.’