Which was how Jim Boxall saw her as he walked down the beach to join his sisters. It stopped him in his stride with an upsurge of desire that was as strong and sudden as it was unexpected. Peggy? he thought. Could that really be Peggy swimming? He’d had no idea she could swim. Nor that she could look so beautiful.
‘Come an’ join us,’ Lily yelled at him. ‘It’s lovely. Ever so warm.’
So he rolled up his trousers and joined them, and got splashed for his pains so that his shirt clung to his chest and his dark hair was soon as wet as Peggy’s. They paddled until Joan said Yvonne was beginning to feel cold to the touch and then they all staggered back up the pebbles to dry themselves while Peggy disappeared inside her tent to change back into her cotton dress again. And he wanted her all the time.
‘I’m starving,’ she said, when she emerged from the tent and she began to rub her hair vigorously with her towel.
‘You would be,’ Baby said, arranging herself on her towel ready to sunbathe.
‘We’ll get some shrimps,’ Jim offered, hoping she’d accept and the others would stay where they were.
To his annoyance both his sisters took him up on his offer and Baby came too. When the shrimps had been bought and he suggested a walk along the promenade, they said they wanted to go on the pier. So off they all trooped, eating and giggling, to sample the delights of the hall of mirrors, the helter-skelter, what the butler saw and a new machine called a ‘love meter’ on which you could ‘measure your sex appeal’. Baby spent five minutes squeaking and protesting before she would submit herself to the test and then walked off in a huff when the machine pronounced her ‘harmless’.
‘Let’s go back on the beach,’ she said. ‘I’m sick of this silly pier.’
So to Jim’s considerable pleasure, Baby and his sisters went giggling back to the beach and he and Peggy were able to go for the walk on their own.
They climbed the hill of an upper promenade, heading east and gradually leaving the crowds behind them, eating their shrimps as they strolled. The view from such a high vantage point was spectacular. They could see both the piers and the entire length of the promenade below them and the people on the beach were as small and dark as a swarm of ants.
But Peggy was mesmerized by the sea, spreading before them, vast and green and endless.
‘I never thought it’ud be so big,’ she said.
‘You’ve seen it in the pictures,’ he said. ‘Must have.’
‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘But it’s not the same.’ At the pictures you saw a dark heaving mass, hardly worth looking at. But this was very different. She leaned her arms against the railings and gazed at it, trying to find words to express what she felt. It was so beautiful, all that gorgeous greeny-blue water, so still and peaceful and yet powerful too, sparkling all over with little flashes of sharp white light as though someone had sprinkled it with diamonds.
‘It makes me think of a piece of Shakespeare we had to learn at school,’ she said. And she tried to quote it. ‘ “This precious stone set in a silver sea.” Or something like that.’
‘ “This demi-paradise”,’ Jim said, quoting it for her. Richard III was one of the plays he’d studied in his first course at the evening institute.
‘This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war.
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in a silver sea
Which serves it in the office of a wall
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.’
She was most impressed by his learning, but sensible as ever, asked, ‘Will it?’
‘Will it what?’
‘Protect us. Like a moat.’
‘Don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘I haven’t thought about it, to tell the truth.’ And he wasn’t thinking about it then either. He was enjoying the sight of her bare arms, her bare warm rounded arms, leaning along the railing, rousing him most pleasurably for the second time that day. In fact he’d been in an almost continuous state of desire for her ever since he’d seen her swimming. It was as if she’d been transformed, as if she wasn’t Peggy Furnivall his next-door neighbour, the girl he’d known nearly all his life, but some rare gorgeous creature ripening in the sun, a water-nymph or a goddess or a …
‘I could go a cup of tea,’ she said, smiling at him. ‘Shrimps don’t half make you thirsty.’
‘We’ll get one,’ he said. But he didn’t move.
‘Good,’ she said. But she didn’t move either.
‘There’s a good film on at the Empire this week,’ he said. ‘Would you like to see it?’
‘Who’s going?’ she said, still easy and lazy, looking out to sea.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘I thought you might like to come with me.’
‘Just you?’ she said, looking at him quizzically. ‘Are you asking me out?’
He realized he was feeling nervous, almost anxious. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I am.’
She smiled at him again, surprised but pleased. If she accepted, this would be her first date. Fancy her first date turning out to be with Jim Boxall. But why not? They were both nineteen now. She’d just had her nineteenth birthday. They were old enough. And there’d be no harm in it. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘All right. Ta.’
He was filled with delight, as if he’d won a great prize. ‘Come on,’ he said seizing her hand and pulling her away from the railing. ‘Race you back to the others.’
It was his third surprise of the afternoon that she beat him with yards to spare. I’m going to take her to the pictures, he thought, escorting her into the cafe. I’m actually going to take her to the pictures. If it’s all right we might go every week.
But the Fates had other plans for Jim Boxall and Peggy Furnivall.
CHAPTER 18
On Tuesday morning when Jim Boxall went back to Warrenden Brothers after the Bank Holiday he found the workshop buzzing with anxious talk and no work being done.
‘What’s up?’ he asked his fellow apprentice.
But the boy didn’t know. ‘Foreman said to wait,’ he told Jim. ‘Not to start or nothink, just ter wait.’
‘Sounds bad,’ Jim said, and foreboding clenched its fist in his belly.
It was bad. They could see that as soon as the foreman came back. He looked as though he’d shrunk and his face was grey. ‘Can’t wrap it up,’ he said. ‘The firm’s going bust. There’s no new orders come. This one’s the last.’
‘How long d’you think we got?’ one of the older men asked.
‘Two, three weeks,’ the foreman said. ‘They’ll close down gradual.’
‘Can’t yer do nothink?’
‘Fer Chrissake Percy, I can’t make work. I only wish I could.’
They accepted his answer and his news dully. In two or three weeks they would be unemployed. They’d been half-expecting it for over a year, and talking about it for several months, but even so there was an awful finality about being told. In two or three weeks they would be on the scrap heap. It was shattering news. They set about their work that morning, listless with defeat.
At the end of the day the foreman had a quiet word with his two apprentices.
‘You’re young yet,’ he said to the boy. ‘You ain’t done two years, have yer, so my advice to you would be ter try something else.’
‘Like what?’ the boy said dully. ‘Course there’s masses a’ jobs round here. I don’t think.’
The foreman ignored his misery and his sarcasm. What could he say to either?
‘It’s you I’m sorry for,’ he said to Jim. ‘Being so near an’ all. How long you done?’
‘Five years,’ Jim said. Five years of grinding effort in the heat and stink, of burnt hands and cut fingers and bone-aching exhaustion, five years from the first humiliation of being greased in to the last humiliation of being sold out, five years
for nothing.
‘I’ll see you get a good reference,’ the foreman said.
‘Thanks,’ Jim said, being polite because the foreman was trying so hard. Not that it would help him get another apprenticeship or even another job. And if he didn’t get another job he wouldn’t be able to afford any more evening classes. And just when he’d started on his third course, which was Economics and really interesting.
The unfairness of it kept him numb all through the day. He worked mechanically, saying nothing. It wasn’t until he was home and out in the yard sprinkling the lavvy with Keating’s powder and flushing out the drains with Jeyes fluid the way he did every evening, that his rage burst through. He hurled the milky fluid into the drain with such force that it splashed up the wall. ‘Bloody sodding God-awful world!’ he swore.
‘What’s up?’ Peggy’s voice said from the other side of the fence.
‘Lost my job,’ he said briefly, looking up at her. ‘Sorry about the French.’
‘That’s all right,’ she said. ‘You swear all you like. I don’t mind. You got a right to swear.’
Then they both realized that their outing to the pictures might be affected, and neither of them knew what to say, he because he didn’t want to call it off, she because she didn’t want to embarrass him.
‘These drains are awful,’ she said. ‘If it don’t rain soon we shall be stunk out the house.’
‘This time yesterday we was at the seaside,’ he remembered. ‘Down to earth with a vengeance today.’
‘Yes,’ she agreed, picking up her can of Keatings. ‘If only it wasn’t so hot.’
‘We’re still going to the pictures,’ he said. It was half statement, half question and she answered it as such.
‘Yes. Course. We could go Dutch if you’d like.’
The idea of asking her to pay for her own ticket appalled him. ‘No we couldn’t,’ he said stiffly. ‘I asked you, so I’ll pay.’
I’ve upset him, she thought, recognizing hurt pride. ‘All right,’ she said, trying to soothe him. But when she looked over the fence he’d gone indoors.
They went to the Empire Cinema that Friday as they’d planned. It wasn’t a success. When he’d asked her out, in that magical sunshine with the sea and the rest of their lives dazzling before them, he’d imagined how it would be, sitting in the darkness watching the flicker of the screen side by side. He’d thought how he’d cuddle her. He’d even hoped he might kiss her goodnight. The reality was miserably different.
They sat discreetly apart, contained within the plush arms of their seats and not speaking. In the interval he bought her an ice-cream and tried to make conversation, but apart from discussing the film there didn’t seem to be much else to say. And then horror of horrors Megan Griffiths came giggling down the aisle to join them with a grinning gang of people they used to know at school.
‘Hello!’ she said. ‘Fancy seeing you two here. I didn’t know you was coming tonight, Peggy. We could’ve all come together if you’d said. Remember Spotty? He said not to come over, daft ha’porth, in case you was courting. There you are, Spotty, what did I tell you? They’re neighbours. They’re not courting, are you?’
They tried to remember Spotty and agreed that they weren’t courting. And when Megan dragged the hordes back to their seats for the second half they were more embarrassed with one another than ever. By the time they’d walked home through the stifling heat of yet another airless night they were quite relieved to part company.
‘Thank you for coming with me,’ he said politely as she fished the front-door key through the letterbox on its string and fitted it into the lock.
‘Thank you for asking me,’ she said.
I shall never get to kiss her goodnight now, he thought unhappily as he pulled the string of his own door key. Damn that Megan and her stupid Spotty. And he went straight up to bed in a very bad mood.
The next two weeks were miserable. On the day the works finally closed he went down to the pub with all his workmates, got drunk for the first time in his life, and regretted it bitterly when he woke with a throbbing headache the next morning. But hungover or not he was up at the usual time and out on the street the minute he’d eaten his breakfast. Somehow or other he would find another job, no matter how badly paid or how objectionable. There were bills to be met and Mum and the girls to be looked after. He couldn’t sit idle.
By the end of the week he was working part time in a local warehouse sweeping floors. The week after that he helped a local window cleaner who’d injured his shoulder in a fall and said he ‘couldn’t face the top floors yet awhile’. And so he continued, accepting whatever was on offer, enduring whenever there was nothing at all, and keeping out of the house so that his father wouldn’t know what was happening, because he had enough to contend with without the old man making scenes. By the time September came round it was clear to him that he couldn’t afford to enrol for the second year of his course in Economics, and for several days he was miserably cast down, because he’d lost his education as well as his job.
But then the weather broke at last with a day of rain, marvellous, soft, sweet-smelling rain. It was such a change after that long stinking drought that people came out of their doors and stood in the street with their faces upturned to enjoy it. Old Mrs Geary opened her window and leaned so far out of it that Pearl and Peggy were afraid she’d fall.
‘No fear,’ she said. ‘I got a good strong instinct fer self preservation, don’t you worry. Ain’t it grand, eh?’
And the parrot, who was sitting beside her at the window, agreed, with a cacophony of squawks and obscenities.
‘Let’s go up the park,’ Pearl said. ‘It’ll be gorgeous up the park.’
So she and Lily and Peggy went to the park and as Jim had just come home they took him along too, to stroll under dripping trees and skip over damp earth and watch the grass recovering before their eyes.
‘Just look at that,’ Pearl said. ‘It’s all going green again. I never seen nothing as quick as that.’
It encouraged them all, this sign that nature could heal so rapidly.
‘You’ll get another job soon,’ Peggy said to Jim, when Pearl and Lily had gone rushing off to be showered under another tree, ‘you’ll see. Things’ll change.’
‘They’re changing already,’ he told her, ‘but all in the wrong direction. The more people there are out of work the less money there is to spend, the less money to spend the fewer goods made, fewer goods made fewer people employed to make them. It’s a vicious circle.’ He’d read enough about economics to understand that. ‘Nothing’ll change until the government starts to employ people, like they’re doing in America in the Tennessee Valley. Even Herr Hitler knows that.’
‘Oh don’t let’s talk about Herr Hitler,’ Peggy said. ‘Not in all this lovely rain. Things’ll change here too, you’ll see.’
‘Only if we make them change,’ he said almost fiercely. ‘It’s no good enduring things. You got to take action.’
Action, she thought, it’s always action with him. ‘Is that what you’re going to do?’ she asked.
‘The minute I can figure out what action to take, yes. It ain’t fair, Peg, grinding people down like this. There ought to be work for everyone, more and more of it, not less and less.’
She was looking at him with such pity that he had to change the subject, ‘Next time we come for a walk,’ he said, wiping the rain from his eyebrows because it was dripping into his eyes, ‘let’s leave the girls behind.’
They took a lot of walks in Greenwich Park that autumn, sometimes on their own and sometimes with Joan and the baby. It wasn’t the same as the romantic intimacy of the cinema, but at least, as they told one another with cheerful frequency, they were spared the company of Megan and the impossible Spotty, who turned out to be Miss Griffiths’ latest pash, although what she saw in him neither of them could possibly imagine.
Despite his hunger for action odd jobs grew more and more difficult for Jim to find. In
October he worked for ten days helping the park keeper burn the autumn leaves, in November he went back to the warehouse for a day or two, but it wasn’t until January that he found a permanent job and then it was one without a future. One of the garages in Blackheath that serviced the cars of the well-to-do advertised for an odd-job boy, and as he seemed quick and willing they took him on. He was still there in April and by then he’d learned so much that the manager had increased his pay and was allowing him to strip the engines.
Now, at last, he could afford to ask Peggy out properly.
It was a great disappointment to him that she refused his offer.
‘I’m ever so sorry,’ she said, ‘but I can’t. Not just yet. Joan’s going to have another baby you see. It’s due in three weeks time and I’m going to look after Yvonne.’
He knew about the baby of course because he’d seen the pregnancy developing. ‘Oh,’ he said, controlling his expression with an effort. ‘I see. Later then.’
‘When it’s born,’ she promised.
But when it was born she spent all her spare time over in Deptford helping with the housework.
‘Poor Joan,’ she said. ‘She’s got enough to do looking after two babies without doing all the housework as well.’
Privately Jim thought she was being just a bit too unselfish, but he didn’t say anything because it wasn’t his business and because he suspected that she wouldn’t take any notice of him if he did.
The babies were so pretty, that was the trouble, so pretty and so loving. Yvonne was twenty months old when her brother was born and just beginning to talk. She could say ‘Mum-mum-mum’ and ‘Dadda’ and ‘More p’ease’, and while she was staying at Paradise Row and sleeping with her aunty Peggy she said ‘Weggy’ as clear as clear to the delight of the entire household. She was a sturdy little girl with plump legs and a stolid way of walking. Her face was still round with her father’s high wide cheekbones and her mother’s decided nose and large greeny-brown eyes that were very much like Peggy’s. The dark hair that had pleased Joan so much when she was born had lightened to a pale nut-brown and now it was long enough to cut into a short bob with a fringe, which Flossie said made her look a proper little girl. Naturally Peggy adored her.
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