Hudson was more or less living in the streets, and never asked for money from her any more. When she asked where he stayed during his absences from home, he refused to say more than that it was with some friends. Most of his friends were young black men who seemed older than him. They swaggered and strolled the streets, and indicated with every gesture and act that they wanted to be thought of as violent, cruel men. They called for Hudson sometimes, and filled Dottie’s heart with dread. They spoke to her in the streets, and were always friendly and polite, calling her by her name and asking after Sophie. Then after they had passed her she would see them turn their jeering attention to a stall-holder in the market, or someone else whose appearance or misfortune had attracted their attention.
It is such a stupid waste, Dottie thought. Whatever has happened to us, to Hudson and Sophie and those young men, has made us believe that we came into this world as if we were beggars, squalling and throwing tantrums, expecting those who summoned us to be dissatisfied and to give up on us. Then when this happens we say how right we were all along. You made me like this. Look at me. This is your work, and now I’ll make you pay for having been foolish enough to want me here in the first place. It was themselves they tortured most of all, she thought, then their loved ones, and all the time, while they ranted and strutted, their enemies waited at the rise of the hill to mow them down. They looked strong and healthy, with sharp, flashing smiles, and a mischievous glint in the eye. It seemed a terrible disaster to her that all the use such natural skills were put to was display and gesture.
Hudson was growing tall, and was much stronger than he had been the year before. Everything about him had changed, she thought. Even his skin had a darker, richer glow. He was more self-conscious, and very deliberate about how he did things. He refused to hurry with anything. When he turned to look at her, it was always after a moment or so, and then with an abrupt, mannered swivel of his head. He was less inclined to abusive outbursts and never dashed out of the room. It was maturity, perhaps, but she wondered if it was the new image of himself that he was creating for the street. She had seen him cleaning and admiring a new flick knife he had acquired, had seen him practise stabbing with it, although that need not be much more than play-acting, she reassured herself, barely suppressing her disgust. She talked to Sophie about what was happening to their brother, but Sophie dropped her eyes guiltily, ashamed of her lack of interest and too involved in her own dramas to spare any of her strength for anyone else.
Dottie could not stop herself from saying things to him. She tried to teach herself to keep quiet, to avoid being critical of his street-life, of his selfishness, but she could not. Sooner or later, when he was around, she said something that would start them squabbling and fighting over the same issues, again and again. Once he lost his temper with her nagging, as he called it. He screwed up the front of her jumper in one hand and told her to leave him alone. She had felt his strength then and, although she struggled and threw a punch and a kick, she felt the contemptuous ease with which he flung her away. The far wall and the stone sink by the window put an end to her headlong rush, but the shudder which shook her slight frame testified to the power with which she had been despatched. ‘What would our mother say if she could see us? What would Sharon say?’ she asked him.
He thought for a long time before replying. ‘She was no better than us,’ he said at last. ‘She got us into this, the smelly old cow.’
She was on her own with him, she thought. She was a little afraid of him and she guessed that he was beginning to suspect it. He looked oddly at her sometimes, a distant, speculative look. Whenever she caught him doing this, she moved away and bustled around the room, shifting or cleaning something. She had resisted admitting it to herself, but she knew that he was taking something. The long, brooding stares and the hooded eyes were not mere style. When she caught this look turned on her, then she feared violence. There! She had said it! She feared her own brother would hurt her. She knew that the boy whose life she had ruined would one day pay her back. She began to find relief in his absence. The loneliness was bearable, she thought. Better that than the anger and resentment she felt when her brother and sister were around and expecting her to skivvy for them. It was time she stopped behaving like a mother-hen and put some order in her own life.
Sophie had been moving her things out slowly, so that she only came to the room for the odd night. She told Dottie she had moved into a flat in Stepney with three other girls who also worked in the cafeteria at Victoria Station. Dottie shrugged, meaning that it was Sophie’s business. She was sceptical about the move but neither her agreement nor her advice was being sought so there was no point in offering an opinion. Sophie had put on more weight, but she now wore dresses that were tight on her and low in the cleavage. The make-up on her face was cleverly done, but it was too much. It made her look like a street tart. Perhaps such things did run in the blood, Dottie thought as she watched her sister walk away, waving as if she was leaving for a long journey. Sharon must have taken the same pleasure in things like that, at one time anyway. Dottie had no doubt that the flat in Stepney would be like one of those rooms she remembered as a child, full of noise and drinking men. She took no pleasure in the memory, and felt no desire to revisit that old territory.
The silence in her room was menacing at first, but she waited it out, feeling her heart find its beat. As before, when she had lived on her own for the first time, she heard the desperate gurglings in the water-pipes when the silence was deep enough, and felt the stealthy movements of the house in the dead of night. She was more ready this time, and stilled her anxiety with thoughts of the gains she had made. It was her room again, and she would look for things to make it better, more cheerful. The landlord had muttered about changing the sink, and she could paint the door a bright colour. Perhaps it was something in the blood, she thought, that made Sophie as she was, and as Sharon had been. When she thought of herself that way, with a man, Dottie felt only a kind of terror. There were times when she wished she could have a man so that she could have that business over with, and have someone to talk to late into the night.
The Image of an Idea
1
Dottie was a veteran in the food-packing factory where she worked. Most of the people employed there were casuals, on a week’s notice and at a different rate of pay from the regular workers. They were part of the city’s shifting and restless crowd of unskilled labour. They came from everywhere, out of every nook and cranny, and drifted in and out of the factory without questions or explanations. Among them were Ukranians and Romanians who had fought with Hitler’s armies; Czechs and Hungarians who had fled Stalin’s cohorts; Iranians, West Indians and Arabs who had come for learning or for work and soon found themselves adrift; Ghanaians and Chileans, who came to seek safety from the child-devouring Molochs who ruled their lands. The world was seething with endless turmoils and industry. The factory was like the metropolitan heart of an empire, drawing to it, as all empires had done, its share of fantasists and fugitives.
Some were bursting with impractical ambitions, which they pursued with the single-mindedness of self-mistrust. Others nursed deep, unassuagable wounds. Even the best among them were overshadowed and made insignificant by the events which had swept them to the banks of this ancient river. They did not yet credit the grandeur of the transformations they were living through, could not yet believe that the short-lived empires which had loomed over their world were being swept away in front of their eyes. Later they would learn to shrug off their exclusion from the higher affairs of men, and stop believing the old lies about the treachery and corruption that pounded through their veins. All they could feel at the start of the new decade was their insignificance to real events, their inability to achieve what they had suffered and sacrificed for. Their lives were filled with bitterness, and were poisoned by a sense of their inadequacy and failure.
There were others among them who liked to act as if they were lovers of life, free-spirits
who were not going to allow themselves to be shackled by the mean ambitions of the people around them. They laughed at everybody and made disgusted remarks about the food in the canteen. When they found the time, they tried to bed as many of the women as they could. Something in their manner made them irresistible, and crowds of young women, themselves fugitive and anguished, sacrificed themselves at their feet. They made it known, these untrammelled souls who could sound the blackest gorges and soar out again, that money was no object to them, despite the temporary discomforts under which they lived. Rich parents of exotic and ancient glamour hovered not far in the wings, and could be conjured with nothing much more than a desperate telegram or two. It was a desire to prove themselves that prevented these heroes from taking the easy course and catching the next plane back to Santiago or Teheran or wherever.
A few of the labourers were students, who looked frightened and depressed but none the less held themselves with the self-conscious stiffness of martyrs. They rested large books on machinery and pretended to read them, and looked delighted and a little agitated when one of the regular factory workers spoke to them.
Dottie was one of the permanent workers. There was so much work available that no one had been laid off in the whole period that she had been there. They thought of themselves as the people who really ran the factory, even though many of them were nothing more than line workers, and did nothing much different from the casuals. It was the fitters and the electricians who were the true aristocrats. They took their time when they were called to a job and arrived looking sleek and put out that the more important things they would normally have been engaged in had had to be abandoned to deal with a troublesome conveyor belt or an ancient pastry mixer. The charge-hand would hover for a few moments, to get an idea of the damage before deciding how to redeploy his staff of line workers, almost all of whom were women or casuals. He could not redeploy the pastry mixer, who at the first sign of trouble from his machine would wash his hands and wander to the coffee room. But the line workers were technically unskilled, and could be shifted and moved without damaging the smooth working of this social machinery.
Because the machines broke frequently, and the fitters and engineers were incompetent, no one had to work very hard. As stocks dwindled and delivery deadlines loomed, there would be plenty of over-time. This was in the gift of the charge-hands, who would have a word with their favourites and friends first before inviting any of the other, selected regulars that they thought deserved the opportunity to make more money. After two years at the factory, Dottie was an old hand and could take as much over-time as the law allowed.
Her charge-hand was a talkative and genial man called Mike Butler. When he was not talking, Mike Butler was striding self-importantly from one place to another, in the midst of pressing business. He was a man in his late fifties, of medium height with a head of lush, silvery hair that he was very vain about. For all his clownish airs, like a busy-body village functionary with too many stories to tell, he was unusually strong and very few people dared to make fun of him.
He seemed to have been present at every important event in recent years, perhaps at every notable happening in the entire twentieth century. He remembered the moment Chamberlain declared war on Germany, almost literally picked the words off his tongue. He had seen the Americans land the first troops in East Anglia, when he himself was serving as ground crew with the RAF. He had been present when Winston Churchill, that war-monger, moved out of Downing Street after losing the election in 1945. He claimed to have been in Korea, China, Japan, and Suez at one time or another, and to have seen enough from his visits to predict the various outcomes that befell those far-flung places. Despite this busy schedule, he still managed to spend much of his youth working for the Ford Car Company, and he did what he could to help the company develop its Popular model. The men tended to find him tiresome, groaning audibly when he appeared. The women enjoyed him more, playing on his egotism for laughs, asking his advice about the best way of roasting a shoulder of lamb or of propagating honeysuckle or whatever. Mike Butler was never defeated by anything, and did not worry unduly about the merits of the questions he was asked. The women took liberties because they could rely on him keeping his hands to himself, which was more than could be said for most of the other men.
He had ignored Dottie at first, if Mike Butler was able to ignore anyone who had the potential to be dazzled and awestruck by his tireless achievements. Just after the race violence in Notting Hill during the winter of 1959, when gangs of Londoners scoured the streets for black victims, he spoke to her. The newspapers were full of outrage at the disturbances that had been going on for months in that part of London. They quoted furious citizens demanding retribution and redress, and tight-lipped officials whose patience was beginning to run out. Their reports put the blame on the tolerant and democratic British way of life for landing the country in another difficult mess. They had been too generous in allowing foreigners to come and live among them. The analyses of the causes of the disturbances lacked neither clarity nor courage. The blacks had been unable to keep their lustful and tormented eyes off the women, and had failed to prevent their turbulent and unruly urges from dictating their behaviour once again. The enraged citizens of West London, and Nottingham and Liverpool, were provoked to the point where they could no longer bear this insolence and took measures to end it. That was what was really at the heart of it all! To make matters worse, the blacks had insisted on moving into areas where English people lived, taking their jobs, walking the same streets as they did and eating in the same restaurants and cafes. And although the newspapers did not praise or condone the thuggish behaviour of the white mobs, there was no question that they had been sorely provoked. Was there ever any hope of solving the colour question? Who would now dare to predict the integration of coloured peoples into our society? Should we begin to think the unthinkable, and expel the miscreants even though such recourse is against all the liberal traditions of this nation?
Some people at the factory made remarks at Dottie in the days that followed the violence. There was talk of jungle bunnies and nig-nogs running amok, living ten to a room and breeding like rabbits. In the changing room she had to put up with the usual insults about bad smells. When she went to the toilet, someone reached over the wall and flushed the cistern while she was still sitting on the toilet seat. There were grumbles about niggers ruining the country and contaminating the culture of the English with ju-ju drums and uncouth dances. The other charge-hand, William Hampshire, who had spoken of sending the bus conductors back to wherever they came from, turned his face away whenever Dottie appeared, only his heavy breathing through pinched nostrils betraying the emotion he was keeping in check. By the middle of the afternoon, his passion overflowed its banks, and he looked meaningfully at Dottie, his mouth prim with disdain while his eyes burned and his mild, pasty face flushed with anger.
To these outraged citizens at the factory, Mike Butler recounted how the present troubles reminded him of the riots in Stepney in 1919, which of course he had witnessed as a young lad of twelve or thirteen. He spoke to whoever was willing to listen, and described the black men and women he had seen being chased in the streets. The newspapers were full of stories then too, although the violence was much worse. There were killings in Cardiff and Port Talbot, Liverpool and South Shields. Houses were ransacked and dens of blacks and Chinese were found lurking everywhere and put to the torch. Hundreds were sent packing, back to their own barbarous lands.
Some people were killed in Stepney too, Mike Butler told them, and he himself saw a black boy in a butcher’s apron being stoned at the corner of Jamaica Street and Stepney Way. The boy was still hanging on to his delivery bicycle as the stones rained around him, worrying perhaps about losing his job, or maybe unable to make himself run for his life without completing his rounds first. ‘This was the period between the wars,’ Mike Butler said. ‘England was an earthly paradise then, my friends. The summers were dry and warm, and t
he winters were mild. Everybody knew his or her responsibility, not like now with this dog-eat-dog competition and greed. You’ve never had it so good, Macmillan tells us, but it ain’t like it was. There was the butcher and the baker down the street, and always a policeman strolling quietly on his beat. You couldn’t imagine anything horrible happening in England. None of this rioting and rape and strikes like we have now. That’s why that boy wouldn’t let go of his bike! He wanted to be sure to finish his rounds after they’d done stoning him.’
The older people, especially the men, made faces at what Mike Butler was saying and moved away. The younger ones listened, but with an incredulous look, as if inclined to take this as another tall story.
‘What happened to the boy?’ Dottie asked, as comments and questions were flying around Mike Butler. He raised his arms in mock surrender, and said that he would take one question at a time. It was an opportunity to talk, and it was clear that he intended to make the most of it. As he moved into his stride, embellishing his story with asides and convoluted interconnections, his audience began to drift away. Soon his eyes were moving around with the manic hunger of the egotist, looking for the listener who would not desert him in mid-sentence. Dottie made her escape before her vulnerability revealed itself.
Dottie Page 10
