‘Don’t keep ’em too long,’ he warned, ‘Or they’ll go off. I’ll give you some more next week if you like.’
‘Won’t he mind, your fishmonger?’
‘Not if ’e don’t see,’ he said grinning at her.
The grin made her feel so welcomed and so much at home she decided she liked him after all.
Over on the other side of the swaying crowd Flossie had found a new friend too. She wasn’t really very sure whether she approved of this get-together or not. It was friendly, there was no denying that, but she had a sneaking feeling it was really a bit too common for her and her children, so when the woman sitting next to her gave a derisive sniff at the start of ‘They’re moving father’s grave ter build a sewer’ she looked round at her with understanding.
‘Dreadful song,’ the woman said. ‘Not the sort of thing really.’
‘No,’ Flossie agreed.
‘You’re new, aren’t you?’ her neighbour said. ‘Yes. I thought so. I didn’t think I’d seen you here before. I live at the end house. Number eight, you know.’ She was a very stiff woman, with a long stiff face powdered shell-pink, bright blue lids to her pale blue eyes, narrow lips enamelled red and dyed black hair marcelled into waves as hard as corrugated iron. She sat bolt upright and as straight as a board under her yellow cotton frock and she didn’t look as though she approved of anything she saw.
Mr Allnutt loomed upon them with a tray and a smile. ‘What can I get you ladies?’ he asked. ‘Mrs Roderick?’
‘My usual, Mr Allnutt,’ Mrs Roderick said, putting the necessary coins on the tray. ‘Port and lemon if you please.’
‘Same for me,’ Flossie said, fishing her money from her bag and feeling glad to be making an equally ladylike choice.
‘Plays lovely, don’t he?’ Mrs Roderick observed, tilting one ear towards the piano.
‘Yes,’ Flossie agreed. ‘Very good.’
‘Plays for the pictures,’ Mrs Roderick explained. ‘That’s what does it.’
The pictures, Flossie thought. How lovely! ‘You got a cinema here then?’ she said.
‘Two,’ Mrs Roderick said proudly. ‘The Hippodrome and the Empire. I go to one or the other every Thursday. All by mesself, but you got to get out now and then, haven’t you?’
‘I go to the pictures Thursday too,’ Flossie admitted, delighted to think that the habit could continue here in Greenwich. ‘Wouldn’t miss it for worlds. I don’t think it matters being by yourself in the cinema.’
‘They got Rudolph Valentino at the Palace next week,’ Mrs Roderick said. ‘In The Eagle.’
‘Oh!’ Flossie breathed. ‘Rudolph Valentino!’
‘Such a sympathetic actor,’ Mrs Roderick said.
‘Oh yes!’
There was a pause while they both thought about their hero and John Cooper took a draught from his pint of bitter.
‘Does Mr Roderick like the pictures?’ Flossie asked, as the solo began.
‘He’s gone,’ her neighbour said lugubriously. ‘Gone long since. Took with the consumption, poor soul. Galloping consumption it was. Ever so bad he was. Well, they said at the ’orspital he was the most chronic case they’d ever seen. The most chronic case.’
‘Poor man,’ Flossie commiserated. ‘How sad for you.’
‘Yes,’ Mrs Roderick said. ‘It was quite a come-down, really. We had such a lovely little place when he was alive. And now I’m reduced to this. If it wasn’t for my ladies I don’t know how I should make out.’
‘Yes,’ Flossie said, trying to look intelligent although she wasn’t quite sure what her new friend was talking about. ‘Don’t fidget, Baby dear. You’ll scuff your nice sandals.’
‘Can I go an’ play with Marie O’Donavan?’ Baby said.
Flossie smiled permission as sweetly as she could, secretly feeling very glad to be rid of her, because for all her charm Baby could be a bit of an embarrassment sometimes with some of the things she said. But then just as she got rid of one encumbrance another one came bawling into the room. Brother Gideon, red-faced and affable with drink, bellowing for his ‘old friend Cooper’.
Mrs Roderick shuddered. ‘That awful man!’ she said. ‘He don’t live here you know. He’s a butcher from right over the other side of town. I don’t see why we have to put up with him week after week.’
Gideon had his red arms round the pianist’s neck. ‘How’s me old mate then?’ he was shouting.
‘They was in the war together,’ another woman explained, smiling at the embrace. ‘In the trenches.’
‘That’s no excuse,’ Mrs Roderick whispered to her new friend. ‘No excuse at all. In my opinion the war has a lot to answer for. All these ex-servicemen begging in the streets. My ladies don’t like it and I can’t say I blame them.’
Flossie was caught between the need to preserve a diplomatic silence in order to save face, and the knowledge that sooner or later Mrs Roderick was bound to find out that she and the butcher were related. ‘Your ladies?’ she temporized.
‘My customers, really,’ Mrs Roderick explained, ‘but I call them my ladies, because they’re more like friends to me you see than customers. They always say so. Mrs Roderick, they say, you’re the best friend a lady could ever have. So charming. I’m a corset fitter you know. Spirella corsets. Only the best, so naturally I move among an altogether better class of person in my line of country.’
‘I used to live in the Tower of London when my husband was alive,’ Flossie said, not to be outdone. ‘We had a very good class of people there. Royalty, you know. The King and Queen were always visiting. Many’s the time I’ve seen them arrive. Lovely people.’
‘Fancy!’ Mrs Roderick said, obviously impressed. ‘Well then you know what I mean, my dear.’
‘Yes,’ Flossie said happily and she was just going to tell her new friend something more about her days in the Tower when Mrs Roderick spoke again and in a different tone of voice.
‘Oh my good God!’ she said, turning up her nose. ‘Now look!’
By now the room was so full of people that Flossie couldn’t see much more than the bouncing backs and gesticulating hands six inches in front of her face. She didn’t even know where Baby had got to with that Marie, which was rather worrying, and Peggy and Joan were quite lost over by the piano. But then two of the backs turned away from one another and she caught a glimpse of a slatternly woman with uncombed brown hair, a blotchy face and a purple nose staggering into the room hauling a small huddled man behind her. Everything about him drooped, his moustache, his eyes, his lank hair, even his jacket and trousers, everything about her seemed to be falling to pieces. ‘Here we are!’ she called. ‘Jus’ in time!’
‘Nonnie Brown,’ Mrs Roderick said. ‘She is my landlady. Now you see what I have to put up with. Tight as a tick most a’ the time, she is. Well you can see. An abomination.’
The abomination had lurched her way to the piano and seemed to be dismantling her handbag. ‘I’ve got it in ’ere somewhere,’ she called. ‘Don’t you worry. I’ll find it.’
‘What’s she looking for?’ Flossie asked.
‘His wretched mouth organ,’ Mrs Roderick sneered. ‘And then he’ll have to play and we’ll have to listen, heaven help us all. She does this every Saturday’
‘Here it is!’ the woman called holding a mouth organ triumphantly aloft. ‘Now we’re all right. Come along, Cyril. They’re all waiting.’
Cyril was shrinking into his shirt, like a tortoise retreating into its shell. ‘No they’re not, Nonnie,’ he said. ‘Really you know. They’re not.’
‘Quite right, mate,’ his neighbours agreed. ‘You give it a miss. Don’t you go playin’ on our account.’
But the instrument was already being pushed into Cyril’s mouth.
‘He can’t play,’ Mrs Roderick said scathingly. ‘Ah, there’s our port an’ lemon. Ta, Mr Allnutt, you’re a gentleman.’
The mouth organ was making wheezing noises to an accompaniment of catcalls and ribald remarks. ‘Go on
Cyril, mate. You show ’em. Why don’tcher pin it to the wall? Then you could suck it off from there.’
‘Aark!’ the parrot shrieked, excited by the antagonism. ‘Bugger off! Bugger, bugger, bugger.’
‘Is it supposed to be a tune?’ Flossie asked, trying to ignore that awful bird, but embarrassed despite her efforts.
‘Don’t ask me,’ Mrs Roderick said, sipping her port and lemon. ‘He always makes that row.’
The crowd in the room began to thin as people took advantage of the lull to pop out the back or nip across to the pub for a quick one. Now Flossie could see Mrs Geary sitting stumpily at one end of the other bench with Joan squatting on the floor beside her. They were sharing a plateful of cockles and Joan was laughing and wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. The laughter and the carelessness of that gesture irritated Flossie into tetchiness, particularly after all the embarrassment she’d had to subdue. The girl had no right to be looking so happy not after the way she’d behaved. She didn’t deserve it. And she won’t do her frock much good sitting on this floor either, she thought, dropping her glance to check it for dirt. Then she saw what her daughter was wearing on her legs. Silk stockings! For heaven’s sake! A servant dismissed without a character and she was wasting her money on expensive silk stockings. I’ll get you to work on Monday, my girl, she thought crossly. High time you buckled down and got some of these silly ideas out of your head.
‘I don’t suppose any of your ladies are looking for a general servant by any chance,’ she asked Mrs Roderick.
‘Live-in or daily?’ Mrs Roderick inquired.
‘Oh daily.’ We don’t want any more living-in nonsense. She can sleep at home where I can keep an eye on her.
‘Well,’ Mrs Roderick said. ‘As it happens I do know someone. Your girl, was it?’
Flossie nodded because speech had suddenly become inaudible. The wheezing had stopped while they were talking and the sing-song had begun again with a roaring, cynical ditty about the dreaded workhouse:
‘Come inside yer silly bugger, come inside,
I thought you ‘ad a bit more sense.
Working fer yer living? Take my tip:
Act a bit stupid and become a lunatic.
You get your meals quite regular
And three new suits beside:
Thirty bob a week, no wife and kids to keep.
Come inside yer silly bugger, come inside.’
Flossie paid no attention at all, either to the song or its cynicism. I’ll have them both at work the minute I can, she thought, looking round the room for Peggy. They needn’t think I’m going to keep them in idleness, oh dear no. That’s not going to be the way of it at all. Joan can start the minute I can find a job for her and in three years time Peggy can follow her. I’m not having any more trouble from either of them.
Fortunately, as they strolled happily back to number six in the early hours of Sunday morning, with Mrs Geary still humming their goodnight song, and Mr Allnutt carrying the exhausted parrot, and all the Boxall children chattering into the house between them, neither of the girls knew that their lives had been planned for them.
‘See yer next Sat’day,’ Mr Allnutt said as they reached the doorstep.
‘Yes please!’ they said in chorus.
‘Glad you come ter London then?’ Mrs Geary asked as they carried the parrot upstairs.
‘Oh yes!’ Peggy said rapturously. ‘It’s the best place in the whole wide world.’
‘Nice lie-in tomorrer,’ Mrs Geary said.
‘It’s tomorrow already,’ Peggy said.
‘So it is,’ Mrs Geary agreed. ‘Nice lie-in terday then.’
The entire street had a lie-in on Sundays. Bedroom curtains stayed drawn until well after ten o’clock and then it was only the women who were up and about getting the Sunday dinner. By midday the street was savoury with the smell of roasting meat or rich stews, for even the poorest inhabitants managed some meat on a Sunday. Mrs Geary cooked hers on the hob beside her fire, and ate every last mouthful. When Peggy came upstairs in answer to her knock on the ceiling she found her sitting beside a tray full of dirty dishes.
‘Be a dear,’ Mrs Geary begged, ‘an’ ask yer ma if she wouldn’t mind just rinsing these through with your things. I’d do it mesself only I got these legs. I’d be ever so grateful, tell her.’
‘We shall have to watch her,’ Flossie told her daughters as Joan put the landlady’s dirty plate in the washing-up bowl. ‘She’s too crafty by half. If we don’t look out we shall be looking after her, cleaning and cooking and I don’t know what-all.’
‘It’s only a plate,’ Joan said, cleaning it.
‘That’s how they start,’ Flossie said. ‘First it’s a plate, an’ then before you know where you are, you’re doing all their work for them. Clear this table will you, Peggy.’
The next morning was wash-day and Flossie’s first row with her landlady, who came downstairs before they’d finished breakfast bearing a pillow case full of dirty washing.
‘I have the scullery Monday, Mrs Furnivall,’ she said to Flossie, ‘ter do me bits an’ bobs.’
‘I’ve just this minute lit the copper,’ Flossie said, feeling she had to make a stand over this.
‘Well how kind,’ Mrs Geary said, hobbling towards the scullery door.
‘I’ve just this minute lit the copper for my wash,’ Flossie said, explaining her position as firmly and unequivocably as she could. ‘For my wash, Mrs Geary. I always wash on a Monday.’
‘Well my dear,’ Mrs Geary said, speaking quite kindly, ‘you’ll ‘ave to change that now, won’t you. You got all the rest a’ the week, when all’s said an’ done.’
‘I always wash on a Monday,’ Flossie repeated.
‘Well there you are,’ Mrs Geary said imperturbably. ‘We all got ter make changes sometime or other. I’ll put your soaps an’ things up on this shelf, then we shan’t get in a muddle.’
Flossie was seething with anger at such humiliation. She always washed on a Monday. All respectable women washed on a Monday. To leave it till Tuesday would be absolutely dreadful. How could this woman be so unkind? It was enough to bring on her nerves. Particularly as she couldn’t say what she thought about it, being a subtenant. An outright row could lose them the house. Oh it was too bad! It really was! ‘Get your hat and coat on,’ she said crossly to Joan. ‘We’re going to get you a job.’
‘Now?’ Joan said, looking at the rasher of bacon still on her plate.
‘Now! Leave that!’
Her years at Tillingbourne Manor had taught Joan to eat on the trot whenever it was necessary, and never to waste food. She put the rasher into her mouth whole, grabbed the remains of her bread and marge, and chewed them both quickly while she put on her hat and coat. She and Peggy managed to exchange grimaces while their mother wasn’t looking at them, then there was nothing for it but to walk obediently to the front door. She went willingly enough, they all had to work, and she could hardly expect to be allowed to stay at home much longer, not after – that. And anyway, a job was only a job.
But the job her mother chose for her this time was more unpleasant than the last. By the end of that morning she was maid-of-all-work to a certain Miss Margeryson and her brother, who claimed to be ‘something in the City’ and was actually a poorly-paid junior clerk. They lived in penny-pinching discomfort and intense respectability on the other side of the railway tracks in a sour house in a jerry-built terrace that had been run up in a hurry by a speculator with city clerks in mind. Consequently nothing in it was quite as it should be, the chimneys smoked, the sash-frames stuck, the range was temperamental and the kitchen floor was so badly buckled it was a nightmare to clean. By the end of her first week Joan was grey with fatigue.
‘I’ve only got one pair of hands,’ she complained to Peggy on Saturday night as the two of them were getting ready for the ding-dong. ‘She’s on at me all the time. Polish the stair-rods, brush the curtains, pumice the doorstep, do this, do that. An’ then
Mum wants me to wash the supper things when I get home.’
‘I’ll wash the supper things,’ Peggy said. ‘I don’t mind.’ She was almost as tired as her sister, because in addition to doing a lot of housework during the day, she was running up and down stairs attending to Mrs Geary.
‘Ta,’ Joan said gratefully. ‘You’re a love.’
‘You going to wear your silk stockings again?’ Peggy asked, leaning her head sideways so that she could brush the tangles out of her long hair.
‘No,’ Joan said opening the drawer to look at them. Everything had changed so much since last Saturday she didn’t feel entitled to luxury any more. ‘They’re not suitable. Not really.’
‘Why not? They was suitable last Saturday.’
‘I wasn’t a skivvy last Saturday,’ Joan explained, buttoning her blouse. ‘Silk stockings are for toffs. People who roll around all day doing nothing. Like Miss Amelia or Miss Margeryson, if she could afford ’em, which I very much doubt seein’ the state of her larder. ’T anyrate they ain’t for skivvies. They don’t look right on skivvies.’
‘They looked lovely on you,’ Peggy said. ‘Ever so pretty. Why shouldn’t a skivvy wear silk stockings if she’s got ’em?’
‘You ready?’ Baby called up the stairs. ‘Mr Allnutt’s come for Polly.’
And so their lives acquired a new London pattern, repetitive housework all through the week, an afternoon at the pictures for Flossie, an occasional visit to the wedding cake church of a Sunday whenever Flossie was feeling particularly religious, daily adventures in the little local park for Baby and her new friend Marie, shopping for bargains in the market late on a Saturday night and the ding-dong to end the week with a roar.
The Furnivalls grew accustomed to their new neighbours. They learned how to make themselves scarce when Mrs Roderick and Nonnie Brown were having one of their rows, and how to persuade Mr Grunewald in the corner shop to let them have ‘tick till Friday when Mum’s money comes’, and they all discovered various ways to let dear old Mr Allnutt help them without recourse to any of his disastrous carpentry.
They learned that Mrs Geary’s legs were bandaged because she had something called ‘varicose veins’ which were peculiar purple knobs and lumps that stuck out of her skin like deformed grapes, and they made rude jokes about Mrs Roderick’s rich ladies and their corsets, and once, on an exciting occasion when she was safely out of the house, they took it in turns to climb on an upturned orange box and peer through the gap in her net curtains to view her formidable creations, hanging stiffly from a long rail in her front parlour, like pink tubes with laces.
London Pride Page 15
