‘Mrs Furnivall!’ she called. ‘There’s a bobby in our street. Come an’ see!’
Flossie was up the stairs in an instant, avid with interest. The two women watched with mounting concern as the policeman marched towards them. They were quite relieved when he knocked next door.
‘Now what?’ Mrs Geary said peering through the gap in her net curtains. ‘D’you think it’s him, Mrs Furnivall?’
‘Nothing would surprise me where that man’s concerned, Mrs Geary,’ Flossie said. ‘I’ve always said he’d get himself into trouble sooner or later. A man with that sort of temper.’
But when the policeman left and Mrs Boxall ran to their door, white-faced and shaking, to stammer out her news, they were both ashamed to have been so uncharitable.
‘Jim’s been knocked over,’ she said. ‘Hit by a van, poor kid.’
‘Is he bad?’ Flossie asked.
‘His arm’s broke, the copper said. An’ something’s happened to his ribs. Cracked I think he said. Oh dear. I got to go up the hospital right away, an’ there’s the girls coming home ter dinner any minute. What if I’m not back in time, Mrs Furnivall? Oh dear, oh dear, I don’t know whether I’m coming or going.’
‘Poor Jim!’ Mrs Geary said, hobbling down the stairs. ‘What a dreadful thing! You cut along, Mrs Boxall dear. We’ll look after ’em. Don’t you worry.’
‘But I don’t know how long I shall be,’ Mrs Boxall grieved. ‘Oh dear, oh dear, what will his father say?’
‘Take as long as you like,’ Flossie said, patting her shoulder. ‘They’ll be all right with us, won’t they, Mrs Geary?’
‘You’ll pop in after, and tell us how he is, won’t you?’ Mrs Geary said.
But Mrs Boxall wasn’t back when her children came home for their dinner and by then the news was up and down the street. Lily and Pearl were most upset, and so was Peggy.
‘I shall go and see him,’ she said. ‘Poor Jim.’
‘They won’t let you in,’ Flossie told her. ‘They don’t have kids in hospitals. They like to keep it quiet.’
‘I’m not a kid,’ Peggy said sensibly. ‘I shall be out at work in August, don’t forget. They’ll let me in, you’ll see. They let me in to see Dad.’
‘That was different,’ Flossie said. ‘You were next of kin. You’re not next of kin now.’
‘Then I shall go with Lily,’ Peggy said, doggedly. ‘She’s next of kin. We’ll go tonight. Nobody else’ll go tonight I’ll bet.’ That wretched Mr Boxall wouldn’t set foot in the place. He’d be off up the pub and Mrs Boxall would have to wait in to feed him.
‘Oh,’ Lily said, doubtfully, ‘I don’t know. I mean … Perhaps Mum won’t let us.’ She didn’t really want to go to the hospital at all. Hospitals were frightening places where people went when they were all covered in blood and they were going to die. She knew that even though she’d never been inside one. Besides it would mean actually having to see what had happened to Jim. It was bad enough knowing without having to look.
But for all her quiet demeanour, or perhaps because of it, Peggy’s determination was implacable. At twenty-five minutes to seven that evening the two girls presented themselves at the gates of St Alphege’s Hospital as visitors for Jim Boxall, Men’s Surgical.
‘You relations?’ the porter quizzed.
‘Tell him,’ Peggy said, prodding Lily.
‘I’m his sister,’ Lily obeyed.
‘Down that corridor,’ the porter instructed. ‘Third on the left.’
It was the first time Peggy had been inside a hospital since her Dad died, and the memory of that occasion filled her mind as she walked down the long corridor, smelling the familiar, frightening mixture of disinfectant and floor polish. Dear Dad! What a long time ago it seemed, standing beside him in that white room, promising to look after Mum, wanting to cry and knowing she mustn’t. Lily clung to her hand, whimpering that ‘she didn’t know, she really didn’t know’, but the decision had been made and there was no going back on it now. She was a soldier’s daughter, born in the Tower of London. And anyway the doors opened at seven.
There were small crowds of visitors waiting outside every door along the corridor, humble in their dark working clothes, and talking in whispers as though they were in church. Peggy and Lily stood at the back of their particular crowd and so they were the last to walk into the ward when the bell rang and a stern-faced sister opened the door. Then there was such a scramble as the other visitors rushed towards the beds that it took a few seconds before Peggy could see where Jim was, and then she could only be certain it was him because his was the only bed left unvisited.
He looked so awful that the sight of him gave her a shock despite her determination to stay calm. He was propped up in one of the beds in the middle of the ward, wearing hospital pyjamas and not moving. His left arm was encased in white plaster, there was a wide bandage all around his chest and his face was so bruised and swollen she could barely recognize it. Lily began to whimper again.
‘Hush up!’ Peggy hissed at her, giving her arm a shake. ‘You make that noise you’ll upset him.’
‘He looks so awful,’ Lily whispered.
‘Smile at him,’ Peggy said, and she sounded so fierce that Lily did her best to obey, stunned that her gentle neighbour was showing such unexpected force. Whoever would have thought it?
But the force was for a purpose. Peggy knew instinctively that whatever else the two of them might do or say they should be quite sure not to let Jim know how bad he was or how awful he looked. Visiting Dad had taught her that all those years ago. He’d be in pain, he was bound to be, and pain was enough to contend with without having to cope with them making a fuss.
‘Hello,’ she said brightly as they approached the bed. And she was pleased to hear how normal her voice sounded.
‘ ’Lo Peg,’ he said, speaking thickly because his lips were swollen. He had an awful black eye, almost closed up, the left side of his face was red and purple with bruises, and when he turned his head she could see a long red cut on his chin sutured with spiky black stitches.
‘Don’t say nothink,’ she advised. ‘I’ll ask questions and you can nod. I’ve brought your book for you, see.’ Holding it up towards his good eye. ‘I don’t suppose you’ll feel much like reading just yet, but I’ll put it on your locker for when you’re ready.’
He was relieved by her tact and good sense. After a day drained by shock and torn by almost perpetual pain he was too exhausted to talk. His ribs ached and his arm pulsed, even now through all the drugs they’d given him. But he managed a nod to thank her.
‘Now then,’ she said, when she’d made Lily sit on the side of the bed where he couldn’t see her and had sat down on the more visible side herself, ‘what do you need? You got hankies?’
Slight shake.
‘D’you need some?’
Equally slight nod. They’d only be bits of old rag but he didn’t tell her that.
‘That’s the way,’ she approved. ‘I’ll bring some tomorrow. I’ll make a sort a’ list. Then we’ll go home an’ leave you to sleep, won’t we, Lily? You’ll feel better tomorrow. Toothbrush?’
The questions continued, gently and easily, letting him take his time to rest between each one and think for as long as he liked before answering. Then she signalled to Lily and stood up to leave. And Lily almost wrecked the visit.
‘Poor old you, Jim,’ she said as she stood up. ‘Does it hurt much?’
He shook his head, but being reminded of his pain seemed to renew it, and the effort it cost him to deny it was movingly obvious, for tears welled into his eyes and his swollen lips began to tremble.
‘Course it hurts,’ Peggy said lightly, turning the moment and the awkward question aside. ‘You are soppy, Lily. Ain’t she soppy, Jim? I don’t know how she ever got to be so soppy.’
This time he nodded, eased by the teasing note in her voice, and managed to control the trembling.
He’s so brave, Peggy thought. It hurts him ter
ribly but he won’t let on. And she was torn with admiring pity for him. ‘We’ll be back tomorrow,’ she promised.
‘Not me,’ Lily said, as they walked off along the corridor. ‘You can come if you like but you count me out. I seen enough. Don’t he look awful!’
‘All right then,’ Peggy said easily. ‘I’ll come on my own.’
And did, bearing a pile of cotton rags from Mrs Geary, a copy of Nicholas Nickleby from Mr Cooper, and a battered toothbrush and a message from Mrs Boxall.
‘Your Mum says she’ll try an’ get in tomorrow,’ she said. ‘You look a lot better.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Feel a lot better.’
‘I got lots a’ messages for you,’ she said. She’d made it her business to gather them so as to have something to talk about. ‘Mr Allnutt says would you like some writing paper. I think he wants you to write him a letter.’
This time she sat beside him for the full hour and entertained him so well that he missed her when she left.
By Saturday evening he was waiting quite eagerly for her arrival. She was his only visitor that evening and the only one he was likely to have, as he knew with resignation. Now that his mother had talked to the sister and understood that he wasn’t going to die and that it was simply a matter of waiting for the plaster on his broken arm to come off, his cracked ribs to mend and his cuts and bruises to heal, she was content to leave him where he was.
‘Perhaps they’ll feed you up a bit,’ she’d said hopefully as she left the ward that afternoon. ‘I’ll come in if you want me for anything.’
‘No,’ he’d said. ‘I’m all right Mum.’ And he’d thought of Peggy as he spoke. Dependable Peggy, the good neighbour. She’d visit him.
That evening they talked about Mrs Roderick and her hideous corsets, or to be more accurate Peggy talked and Jim listened and laughed as often as he dared, for speech and laughter were both too painful to be attempted too often.
‘How’s Tabby?’ he asked, when they’d criticized most of their neighbours.
‘Missing your fish.’
‘I’ll be home soon, tell her,’ he said.
‘Will you?’
‘In about a week, they say. When they’ve took the stitches out. An’ then I’ll go straight down the market and scrounge some pieces. It’ll be the first thing I do.’
‘She’ll like that,’ Peggy said. ‘She missed ’em this evening.’
He suddenly realized what day it was and what else was being missed. ‘You ought to be at the ding-dong,’ he said, feeling remorseful because she’d foregone it on his account. Now that really was friendship.
‘I’m going straight there when I get back, don’t you worry,’ she said. ‘They’re all waiting to hear how you are.’
She’s taken responsibility for me, Jim thought, but it didn’t surprise him. It seemed a perfectly natural thing for her to do.
And so the visits and the conversations continued. By Wednesday he had recovered enough to tell her about his injuries and to describe what little he could remember of the accident. On Thursday he told her about the nightmare he’d had the night before.
‘I was falling through the air,’ he said, ‘and there was this pit full a’ snakes all hissing and writhing. I can’t stand snakes. Never could.’
‘I know how you feel,’ she said, and exchanging confidence for confidence, she told him about the ghost in the Tower, who ‘must have been buried alive to walk like that’, and the Tillingbourne anchorite, ‘bricked into a tiny cell with no windows or light or anything, imagine it’, and how her greatest fear was the thought of being bricked up alive like they were.
He was amazed by the story and by her confession of fear. ‘Not likely to happen nowadays though,’ he said, to bring them back into comfortable territory.
‘No, thank heavens,’ she agreed.‘They was horrible in them days:’
‘Changed a bit now,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t want to be an anchorite, would you?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I would not. And I wouldn’t ha’ wanted to be one then neither.’
He looked at her, sitting so steadfastly beside him, and it occurred to him that until this week he’d never really looked at her before. She’d been one of his neighbours, that was all, a short brown-haired girl with the sort of bland, chubby-cheeked London face that he saw over and over again in the streets and markets, and here in the hospital too. But now he was noticing other things.
‘You’ve got green eyes,’ he said.
Such a personal observation made her blush. ‘They’re like my Dad’s,’ she said, maintaining her composure with difficulty. ‘Greeny-brown with brown stripes.’
‘So they are,’ he said, looking at them again. ‘You got a tabby cat and tabby eyes.’
And that pleased them both and the pleasure encouraged her to tell him all about her father and what a dear kind man he’d been and how much she’d loved him.
‘Lucky you,’ Jim said, when she stopped to draw breath. ‘My old man’s not … Well you know what he’s like.’
‘Yes,’ she admitted. ‘I do.’ In the curtained privacy of a hospital ward, under the buzz of other people’s conversations, it was possible to say such things.
‘He’s rotten to the old gel sometimes,’ he said. ‘He don’t treat her right. When I’ve finished my apprenticeship there’s gonna be some changes I can tell you.’
‘What will you do?’ she asked.
‘Give her enough money to feed us fer a start,’ he said, quite fiercely. ‘Then I shall get out of that house. Find her a flat with a bath and running water and an indoor lavvy.’
‘Leave Paradise Row you mean?’
‘Yes. Course. Wouldn’t you?’
She hadn’t thought about it. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t think so. I like it there. It’s nice. What about the ding-dong?’
‘Don’t you want to change things?’ he asked. It didn’t seem possible that anyone would go on enduring life in Paradise Row if they had a chance to escape from it.
‘We had a rector in the country,’ she said, remembering him, ‘used to preach about making changes. Always on about it he was. He used to say, God give us the grace, or something or other, to … what was it?… change those things that ought to be changed and endure those things that ought to be endured, and know the one from the other.’
‘That’s right,’ he said, delighted by the quotation. ‘Change things, you see. That’s what we all ought to do. Why should a rich man live in luxury up Blackheath and the poor pig it in Paradise Row? Why shouldn’t we all have baths and a bedroom of our own and plenty to eat?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. She’d always taken the prayer to mean that they were supposed to put up with things. What can’t be cured must be endured, as Dad used to say. It was odd that he should interpret it so differently.
The sister was ringing her bell to mark the end of the visiting hour.
‘See you tomorrow,’ Peggy said, rising to go. And in an attempt to end their conversation on a lighter note. ‘I’ll change your library book. That’s a change I can manage.’
‘Goodbye, Peg,’ he said, smiling at her gratefully. ‘Thanks for coming.’
‘Soon be home,’ she said.
But by the time his stitches were out and his ribs were sufficiently healed to be allowed home to a riotous reception at the next Saturday night ding-dong, nine more days had passed and they had established a friendship that had become so intimate it was quite a relief to be relinquishing it and returning to the light of common day. But her admiration for his endurance and courage and his gratitude for her good sense and reliability continued unabated, and long after they both thought they had forgotten them, they were still putting down stronger and stronger roots.
CHAPTER 14
There were times when Baby Furnivall found herself wondering whether it was really a good thing to be so spoilt. She knew how spoilt she was, of course. How could she be off knowing when she always got the best of everything? First
in the bathtub before the kitchen fire of a Sunday evening, best cut off the joint every Sunday lunch-time, a new frock when Joan and Peggy both had theirs turned, ha’pennies for sweets, going to the pictures every school holiday with Mum and Mrs Roderick. Although to be honest that was difficult sometimes because Mrs Roderick was so sticky. Not that she could ever get Joan and Peggy to understand that. They thought it was unfair, because Mum had never taken them when they were at school. And Mum made matters worse by some of the things she said.
Take that first time, when they’d gone to see Al Jolson in The Singing Fool. Peggy had just started work as a housemaid at Miss Jones’ over on Blackheath, and she’d come home with her hands all cracked and bleeding from the soda she had to use for cleaning, just at the very moment when she and Mum had their hats and coats on ready to go out. So it wasn’t really the best of times. But Mum couldn’t see that.
‘We’re just off,’ she’d said. ‘Your supper’s dished up. It’s on the stove.’
‘Off where?’ Peggy asked, rubbing her hands.
‘To the pictures. It’s the first talking picture. Al Jolson.’
‘Is she going?’ Peggy said, glaring at her sister.
The glare had put Mum’s back up. ‘And why not?’ she said. ‘We can afford it now.’
‘Now that I’m working,’ Peggy said bitterly. ‘Oh don’t say it. Now that I’m working.’
‘If you’re going to be unpleasant we shall go all the quicker,’ Mum said. ‘It’s not nice to be jealous of your sister. You should try and control it. We all have to work, you know.’
Peggy walked across to Baby and held out her chapped hands right in front of her eyes. ‘Take a look,’ she ordered. ‘That’s what work does. That’s what’ll happen to your hands when the time comes. Take a good look.’
It was really upsetting. She didn’t have to do that. There was no call to be so nasty. Fortunately Mum soon put a stop to it.
‘Come along, Baby,’ she said, heading for the door. ‘We can’t stop here listening to spiteful nonsense. Put your hat on.’
London Pride Page 19
